The United Nations marked the 1990s as a decade for natural disaster reduction, but 1999 has been one of the worst on record. Tim Radford reports
Here is how to become a disaster statistic. Move to a shanty town on an unstable hillside near a tropical coast. Crowd together as more and more people arrive. Wait for the world to get a little warmer. More evaporation means more rain, which means the slopes will get progressively more waterlogged. One day, the land will turn to mud, and the neighbourhood will begin to go downhill. Literally.
If the slope is steep enough, a landslide can accelerate to more than 320km/h. Nothing can withstand it. What roads there may have been are gone. Rescuers will not be able to get in, survivors will have trouble getting out. There will be no food, no clean water. The uncounted dead will remain in the shaking soil. Epidemics of cholera and fever will follow.
It has just happened in Caracas, Venezuela, and it will happen again somewhere else very soon.
Peter Walker, director of disaster policy for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Geneva, has seen it too often. He remembers some of the bedrock facts of survival after Hurricane Mitch hit central America in 1998, dumped metres of water on the steep hillsides, and started landslides in which more than 10 000 perished.
“We were talking about three metres of carcasses, debris, sand, just unusable land. They are having to rebuild from scratch and the next time a disaster hits, they have so much less to work with. That’s the real threat.”
The catastrophe of Caracas came in the very last days of a decade marked out by the United Nations as an international decade for natural disaster reduction, IDNDR for short. The theory behind the decade was that as people were made aware of hazard, so they would prepare themselves to survive it. For a bitter cocktail of reasons, IDNDR didn’t work out like that.
During the 1990s, the world population grew at the rate of 10 000 people an hour: 240 000 potential new victims every day, nearly 90 million a year, almost a billion in the decade.
Most of the population growth was in the developing world, where people desperate for work moved to the cities, and then found homes on marginal soils, crowded into substandard buildings. Politically, too, life moved on. The idea that governments have an obligation to consider the welfare of all their citizens has been progressively weakened throughout the decade.
On top of all that, add climate change and the spectre of global warming. Seven of the 10 warmest years have occurred in the 1990s. The other three were all in the late 1980s. A hotter ocean breeds fiercer cyclones and hurricanes. It surrenders greater quantities of water as evaporation, and more powerful winds dump this water against mountainsides with increasing fury.
Last year – the warmest on record – was the worst year ever for climate-related disasters. According to Red Cross calculations, 57 513 people died and 335 million people lost their homes, or their livelihoods, or their children, or their hopes. The economic bill was put at more than $50-billion.
There are floods now in Vietnam and Yemen. There has been flooding in the Congo. People in Vanuatu were swept away by a tsunami last month. A cyclone hit the coasts of Orissa, India, in October. Three hurricanes hit the eastern seaboard of the United States. Disaster professionals have totted up more than 75 cases of major natural disaster since the year began.
By the time it ends, 1999 will look like a year for apocalyptic fantasies; a kind of rehearsal for the predicted arrival of four horsemen, swiftly on the heels of the midnight moment of the closing millennium, cantering to bring calamity to a climax. If only.
All the betting from the disaster professionals is that things will get worse. A burgeoning population will go on competing for unevenly shared resources in a world in which sea levels will rise and land will dwindle. At the same time as millions are made miserable by torrential rain and flooding, many arid zones will become drier. This is already evident: the Yellow River, once notorious for flooding the Chinese landscape, failed to reach the sea at all on 226 days in 1997.
Around half the world now lives in cities, and more than 500 million people live within range of a volcanic eruption. There are more than 500 active volcanoes, and around 50 of those are in eruption each year. An even greater number live at risk from earthquakes. These have taken more than 1,6-million lives this century, and the shaking earth claimed new victims this year in China, Turkey, Mexico and Greece.
In each region, survivors will go on paying the price for years – and the poorest are hurt the most. A quake in Kobe, Japan, in 1995, killed 5 466 and made 300 000 homeless. Some of the victims are in temporary housing five years on, others are still paying off mortgages for homes that suddenly ceased to exist in a few seconds. The survivors in tents along the Anatolian faultline will be in temporary shelter for years to come, at the mercy of increasingly inhospitable skies.
That is because a warming world means a stormier world, as people in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh discover repeatedly.
“There are 40% more intense Atlantic hurricanes now than there were 30 years ago,” says Professor Bill McGuire of the Benfield Greig hazards research centre at University College, London. “That’s one effect of warming the sea. You are going to get more windstorms. You are going to get unprecedented amounts of rain in very short times.”
McGuire is a vulcanologist. He has been warning for years that the world hasn’t seen the worst nature can do, not by a long way. The worst eruption in human history was probably Mt Tambora in 1815, in Indonesia. It pumped so much dust into the stratosphere that it effectively cancelled the following summer in Europe and the US, triggering famine and in part, at least, a worldwide cholera epidemic.
But geological evidence shows that 73 000 years ago there was a super-eruption that caused the kind of global winter you might expect only after allout thermonuclear war.
There are 30 000 earthquakes a year, most either relatively mild, or in uninhabited areas. Disaster experts estimate an average of one major disaster each year. Some of the nations at greatest risk – the US, Japan, New Zealand – have educated populations and carefully monitor building standards. But the lesson is that even prepared countries are not prepared enough, and a big earthquake in a rich nation could still trigger effects that would ripple round the world. Even if a disaster doesn’t cost lives, it still costs money. With worldwide economic growth, more is always at stake. The insurance losses last year were more than the total for the entire 1960s.
“The big one everyone is waiting for is Tokyo. It will come, and that will result in global economic chaos, and it will kill a hell of a lot of people as well,” says McGuire. “There are still a million wooden buildings in the Tokyo region. The gross domestic product of the area is greater than that of Britain, and if that is wiped out, the Japanese will have to recall all their monetary resources abroad, and that will devastate the global economy.”