# 5501
A fascinating 94-page report this morning on the natural disasters of 2010 from Elizabeth Ferris, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy and Daniel Petz, Senior Research Assistant, Foreign Policy of The Brookings Institution.
A Year of Living Dangerously: A Review of Natural Disasters in 2010
April 2011 —
Almost 300 million people were affected by natural disasters in 2010. The large disasters provided constant headlines throughout the year, beginning with the devastating earthquake in Haiti followed one month later by the even more severe—but far less deadly—earthquake in Chile. In the spring, ash spewing from volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland paralyzed flights for weeks in the northern hemisphere. Early summer witnessed the worst Russian wildfires in history while a few months later, the steadily rising floodwaters in Pakistan covered 20 percent of the country. In sum, it was a terrible year in terms of natural disasters causing havoc and destruction around the globe. However, many of the largest disasters barely made headlines in the Western press.
Despite the high death toll, and the hundreds of millions of people affected, the total number of natural disasters in 2010 (n=373) was a bit lower than the 10-year average (n=394).
In terms of the number of people affected, two Chinese disasters you probably heard very little about take the top spots:
- 134 million affected by the floods and avalanches in southern and central provinces that began in early May
- 60 million affected by the worst drought in a century in Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Sichuan and Chongqing.
In comparison, the Pakistan floods, which saw far more international attention (and humanitarian relief donations), affected just over 18 million people.
A bit surprisingly, the Haitian earthquake comes in at #10 on this list, with just under 4 million affected.
When looking at total fatalities, however, Haiti is far ahead of the rest with 316,000 earthquake related deaths.
The disaster that claimed the second highest number of fatalities (n=55,736) was the Russian heat wave and wild fires of last summer.
This report is complemented by numerous charts and graphs based primarily on disaster data compiled by EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database – www.emdat.be, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels (Belgium).
Perhaps the most sobering statistics are those that deal with the disproportionate funding of disaster relief around the globe.
The two highest profile disasters; the Haitian earthquake and the Pakistan floods, received 96.56 % of governmental and large NGO natural disaster humanitarian funds (according to the UN’s Financial Tracking System), with 54 other major disasters dividing up the remaining 3.54% percent of relief funds.
When viewed in terms of dollars donated for each person affected by a disaster, Haiti comes in first with roughly $948.37 per person, followed by Pakistan with $121.67 per person.
At the bottom of the list are the 134 million Chinese affected by last years floods who received a total of $150,000 or about $0.001 per person; almost 1 million times less than was donated for Haiti’s earthquake affected population.
Disparities such as these are nothing new, of course.
This report points out that the funding for disaster relief after the Indonesian earthquake & Tsunami of 2004 was `over $7,100 for every affected person’.
That same year, funding for victims of Bangladesh’s floods worked out to be only $3 per person.
You’ll also find detailed discussions on Earthquakes and Floods, Volcano disasters, and the `Renter’s Dilemma’; the finding that renters are a vulnerable and often neglected group during disaster recovery efforts.
I’ve just mentioned a few of the highlights of this report, it is filled with much detail, and very much worth downloading and reading in its entirety.
