Reducing disaster risk: A challenge for development (original) (raw)

Natural disasters exert an enormous toll on development. In doing so, they pose a significant threat to prospects for achieving the Millennium Development Goals in particular, the overarching target of halving extreme poverty by 2015. Annual economic losses associated with such disasters averaged US$ 75.5 billion in the 1960s, US$ 138.4 billion in the 1970s, US$ 213.9 billion in the 1980s and US$ 659.9 billion in the 1990s. The majority of these losses are concentrated in the developed world and fail to adequately capture the impact of the disaster on the poor who often bear the greatest cost in terms of lives and livelihoods, and rebuilding their shattered communities and infrastructure. Today, 85 percent of the people exposed to earthquakes, tropical cyclones, floods and droughts live in countries having either medium or low human development. This Report is premised on the belief that in many countries the process of development itself has a huge impact-both positive and negative-on disaster risk. It shows how countries that face similar patterns of natural hazards-from floods to droughtsoften experience widely differing impacts when disasters occur. The impact depends in large part on the kind of development choices they have made previously. As countries become more prosperous, for example, they are often better able to afford the investments needed to build houses more likely to withstand earthquakes. At the same time, the rush for growth can trigger haphazard urban development that increases risks of large-scale fatalities during such a disaster. The same is true in many other areas. While humanitarian action to mitigate the impact of disasters will always be vitally important, the global community is facing a critical challenge: How to better anticipate-and then manage and reduce-disaster risk by integrating the potential threat into its planning and policies. To help frame such efforts, this Report introduces a pioneering Disaster Risk Index (DRI) that measures the relative vulnerability of countries to three key natural hazardsearthquake, tropical cyclone and flood-identifies development factors that contribute to risk, and shows in quantitative terms, just how the effects of disasters can be either reduced or exacerbated by policy choices. Our hope is that the index will both help generate renewed interest in this critical development issue and help bring together stakeholders around more careful and coherent planning to mitigate the impact of future disasters. Mark Malloch Brown Administrator United Nations Development Programme FOREWORD development and disaster risk, we wanted to highlight these development choices. Disaster risk is not inevitable, but on the contrary can be managed and reduced through appropriate development actions. This is the message we want to convey in this Report to our programme countries, our donors, our partners in the United Nations system, regional and international organisations, civil society and the private sector. A great deal of support was provided in preparation of this publication, known as the World Vulnerability Report when the process began in 2000, and we acknowledge many generous contributions. Contributors The technical production of the Report was made by the following team: Mark Pelling (editor), Andrew Maskrey, Pablo Ruiz and Lisa Hall. Yasemin Aysan was responsible for the overall coordination of the Report in its first stages, with critical support from Ben Wisner and Haris Sanahuja. The preparation of the Disaster Risk Index (DRI) was originally conceived during the meeting of a Group of Experts in 2000 and commissioned to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Global Resource Information Database (GRID) in Geneva. Main scientific collaborators include Hy Dao, Pascal Peduzzi, Christian Herold and Frédéric Mouton. Maxx Dilley and Haris Sanahuja provided key guidance in concepts and definitions. We would like also to thank those whose work has directly or indirectly contributed to the success of this research, such as Brad Lyon and his colleagues from the International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate Prediction at Columbia University for his methodology on determining physical drought. Regina Below and Debarati Guha-Sapir for EM-DAT databases and Bruce Harper, Greg Holland and Nanette Lombarda for input on tropical cyclones. This work also benefited from the contributions of