UN: Seismic threats a serious matter for cities

MANILA, Philippines - The United Nations has urged all cities in the world to take seismic threats seriously, revealing new data that showed major natural disasters have claimed thousands of lives and affected millions of people in 2010 and 2011, including the devastation caused by tropical storm “Sendong” (international name Washi) in the Philippines last month.

The new statistics published by the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) showed that 20,943 people were killed in earthquakes last year out of a total of 29,782 people that perished in 302 disasters.

The earthquake fatalities included 19,846 people in Japan in March while the remainder was largely accounted for by the October earthquake in Turkey, according to a news release issued by the Geneva-based UNISDR.

UNISDR chief Margareta Wahlström said many major cities located in seismic zones should take seriously the probability of return events even if many years have passed since the last seismic event of major magnitude.

“In 2010 we saw this phenomenon as well when over 220,000 people died in Haiti, which had not been hit by an earthquake of such strength for almost 200 years,” she noted.

“Unless we prepare for the worst then many earthquake-prone urban areas around the world are destined to see even greater loss of life in the future as more and more people move to cities.”

In 2011, major disasters in terms of human impact and economic losses occurred in high and middle-income countries, according to the new figures.

These included the floods in Brazil in January, the Japan earthquake/tsunami in March, Hurricane “Irene” in the United States (August/September), floods in Thailand (August to December), the earthquake in Turkey (October), and the flashfloods caused by Sendong in the Philippines in December.

CRED estimates the economic losses from disasters in 2011 at $366 billion compared to $243 billion in the last record year of 2005.

Other major causes of disaster deaths last year were floods, which claimed over 5,000 lives, and storms, which claimed over 3,000.

Extreme temperatures claimed 231 lives compared to the annual 10-year average of 14,731 between 2001 and 2010.

Overall, 206 million people were affected by a total of 302 recorded disaster events last year, the new figures show. Some 106 million people were affected by floods while 60 million were affected by drought, mainly in China and in the Horn of Africa, and storms impacted on 34 million people.

More than 45 percent of the disasters that occurred in 2011 took place in Asia. Over 85 percent of those killed and those affected globally and 75 percent of economic damages were also in Asia.

Europe experienced very few disasters and impacts in 2011 with the lowest numbers killed, numbers affected and economic damages since 1990.