The number of earthquakes, floods, typhoons and other ‘natural
disasters’ was well below the 21st-century average last year, even
though 10,000 people were killed and 60 million affected. But things may
well change for the worse in 2019, warns Debarati Guha-Sapir of the
University of Louvain.
Guha-Sapir and her colleagues at the Centre for the Epidemiology of
Disasters, or CRED, are disaster watchers, based at the Belgian
University of Louvain.
Using a database of 18,000 disaster events that goes back to 1900, they compile an annual review in conjunction with the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. The study, focused on a wide range of natural hazards,
is used by governments and UN agencies as they track losses and damage
and plan disaster mitigation and adaptation in the face of climate
change.
Among the unusual events Guha-Sapir noted in a recent presentation of 281 climate and geophysical events in 2018
were wildfires in Greece that killed 126 people – the worst seen in
Europe since 1900. US wildfires were also exceptional: causing over $16
billion in damages and killing 88 people. Half of 2018’s
disaster-related deaths were in Indonesia, however, mainly due to
earthquakes.
Guha-Sapir took some time out during a visit to Geneva to discuss why
it’s still tricky to calculate death tolls, whether storms are becoming
more intense, and her predictions for 2019.
IRIN: When we write about disasters it’s
very tempting to say they're increasing, the impact is worse, and to say
that climate change is the cause. How many of those three things are
true?
Debarati Guha-Sapir:
Are natural disasters increasing? They probably are, but not all. So
what does that mean? I don't want to complicate the story but… from what
we see, some of the meteorological events, such as storms or typhoons,
those kinds of events are probably on the increase... that I think is
really due to climate change, it's a direct impact on the storms. Those
are on the increase.
Phenomena such as drought? These are very difficult phenomena because
it's very hard to define when a drought begins and when a drought ends.
But droughts have also been increasing, but not necessarily entirely
driven by climate change. I think a lot of the droughts are closely
associated with land use patterns, land use regulations, deforestation,
some of those more proximate causes.
Earthquakes or geophysical events – volcanic eruptions, earthquakes,
dry landslides – we don't see any evidence that they are actually
increasing. It's very hard to make a call on that because those are
phenomena you have to see over hundreds of years… But I will make a
small parenthesis on that. They may not be on the increase, but what is
happening is that there is an increase in the density of population in
areas that are highly seismic.
For earthquakes, I don't think the number of events is increasing,
but there is more population living on seismic areas. But for storms and
meteorological events, and droughts, those are increasing, yes.
Lives lost to disasters in 2018.
IRIN: Are they more intense?
Guha-Sapir: You have
two characteristics that can change at the same time, and which can
determine what the human impact is going to be. One is that the event is
more severe, as you say: it's just a monster event and you know it will
kill a lot of people and damage a lot of infrastructure, or it's not as
severe but it goes through a highly-populated area.
Now, if you ask me which of the two it is, I would rather not
stick my neck out on that… I would argue that if there is any change in
these phenomena, it may not be quite as much in the severity of the
event, but more in the population in the areas which they pass.
IRIN: You say there is insufficient data to
measure the impact on human beings. Why is that? Given technological
advances, surely we could be a lot further on than just counting bodies
in morgues?
Guha-Sapir: I don’t
know. I think the technology today would allow us to be able to get a
much finer and a much more accurate picture on the impact. So you have
this new technology and innovative technology which are moving along
like a juggernaut… those [sources] are very appetising, but we do not
have the means yet to be able… to see whether we're getting the same
information but from 15 different sources, and we are adding them all
up. So I think there is a gap in not the reporting of data, but in being
able to process it in a way that we get accurate results.
As far as the deaths are concerned, that is more structural. That is
because [with] many of the disasters today, especially the
climate-related disasters, it's very hard to pinpoint a particular
death, to the phenomenon… If you go into a district where there has been
floods and you say how many people have died, it can vary enormously,
because how do you decide which death is actually associated?
We have to improve methodology of determining which are the deaths that are really associated to the disaster.
Secondly, the other part of your question is why don't we do better
with all this new technology? I would hope that we will do better, we
need better ways of determining accuracy of this mad big data thing to
be able to get reliable results
IRIN: What are your top three predictions for 2019?
Guha-Sapir: This is a risky affair.
First of all, we think that 2019 is likely to see more El Niño activity than we have in 2017 and 2018.
That will mean more meteorological activity on the South American
coasts and maybe even other parts of the world, including southeast Asia
and East Asia.
Second, we think droughts are going to have... a very big impact on food security.
This is [a] very important aspect: it's not a very spectacular aspect
because [with] a little bit of hunger nobody really cares… they only
care when people are actually dropping dead … So we think food security
and droughts are going to be a very big issue, and in some parts like in
East Africa and southern Africa it may just develop into famine-like
conditions.
Thirdly, we've had quite a long period of seismic and geophysical
[and] volcanic activity, small activities, building up. So the
likelihood that there is a major earthquake or a volcanic eruption is
not highly unlikely. (This interview was edited for length and clarity) (TOP PHOTO: Standing in a drying dam after an El Niño enduced drought in Zimbabwe. CREDIT: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/UNICEF)
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