The disadvantage with disaster league tables is their innevitable focus on
magnitude - hence at the cost to the "small" ones. It is necessary
therefore to take account of proportional impact; ie: the ratio of losses
with what was there before - in population, housing, etc and of course, at
any unit "level" - national, state and subdivisions.
In this way, even the "small" and distant ones will have their own - often
impressive - significance; and disasters in small places, innevitably of
small magnitude, achieve their rightfull position - if league tables are
necessary at all. Otherwise, it is clear that the entire populations of
small countries (eg: some island states) may be smaller than the number of
victims in continental disasters of large magnitude.
Focus on magnitude also innevitably reflects the assumption that only large
measures are any use for disaster reduction; an assumption that needs to be
questioned.
There is a possibly usefull (small) book based on these and other
approaches: Develeopment in Disaster-prone Places: Studies of
Vulnerability. IT Publications, London.
James Lewis.
At 12:13 07/12/99 -0500, David Etkin wrote:
>Hello All,
>
>Putting together these disaster databases is very diffucult. Emergency
>Preparedness Canada has made an attempt to document Canadian Disasters with
>some assisstance from myself and some students. Their database can be
>viewed at http://www.epc-pcc.gc.ca/research/epcdatab.html
>
>I was using the CRED database a while back to look at regional disaster
>impacts, and noticed that when the number of affected people was divided by
>the regional population, Oceania stood out like a sore thumb. A primary
>reason for this was 2 droughts in 2 consequtive years, each of which was
>estimated to affect around 7 million people (I would have to check to make
>sure, but it was something like that...). I asked Roy Leigh from Macquarie
>U about it, and he said that the drought would be better being put down as 1
>event lasting 2 years not 2 single year events (I did send an email to CRED
>about this). This single change made a large impact on the statistics!! As
>well, he noted that many people were 'affected', but in trivial ways. An
>affected person in a developing country might be quite different from an
>affected person in Australia. I am sure there is a strong bias towards more
>developed countries that have good reporting systems in place.
>
>For what it is worth, I am attaching a couple of tables put together by some
>students - mainly Ilan Kelman and Mara Kerry - listing many of the more
>significant natural disasters. As these tables will be part of an article I
>am writing with Ian Burton on natural disasters for a UNESCO encyclopaedia,
>I would welcome any comments or suggestions.
>
>In Canada, it is really nobodies job (that I know of, anyway) to routinely
>document the costs of disasters, and thus it is done sporatically and with
>minimal resources. Prof. Mohammed Dore (Brock U.) recently did a study of
>the economic impact of the 1998 Ice Storm, and came up with a conservative
>estimate of $4.2 billion CAN, whereas previous estimates had been around $3
>billion or less. Believe it or not, one study done by the Conference Board
>of Canada found that there was a small economic benefit to the Ice Storm
>disaster!!! Most of the other studies done on the impact of disasters in
>Canada seem not to have been done by economists - and that must change if we
>are to get a handle on the costs.
>
>I am quite interested in the relative costs of the smaller events, as
>compared to the few catastrophic ones. Are they really larger? Are there
>any studies to document this? I read somewhere in a FEMA report that they
>amounted to about half of US disaster costs. My intuition tells me that if
>worst case scenarios are included, however, the costs of the few extremes
>will overwhelm the cumulative costs of lesser events - I may well be wrong
>of course. In Canada, if you look at the few extreme events and what they
>cost in federal disaster assistance and the insurance industry they do
>overshadow previous cumulative totals, and we have come nowhere near a worst
>case scenario which would be about an order of magnitude worse than some of
>the disasters that have happened in recent years (a paper outlining many of
>the costs of disasters in Canada can be viewed at
>http://www.ec.gc.ca/climate/ccs/volume8_chapters.htm - take a look at
>Climate Change and Extreme Events: Canada by D. Etkin).
>
>The issue of climate change, and how it will affect natural disasters is
>fascinating. According to the billion dollar disaster list published by
>NCDC ( http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ol/reports/billionz.html ) droughts and
>floods dominate the list. These are the two types of extremes most likely
>to become more intense in the future, due to an intensification of the
>hydrological cycle. I have seen some estimates of the return period of
>temperature extremes (these are strongly correlated with droughts), and by
>the mid to late 21st Century they are expected to drop significantly.
>
>Yours truly,
>
>Dave Etkin
>Adaptation and Impacts Research Group
>Environment Canada, at the University of Toronto
>33 Willcocks St., #1016
>Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>(416) 978-6310
>[log in to unmask]
>http://www1.tor.ec.gc.ca/airg/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Nick Hall <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: December 7, 1999 7:08 AM
>Subject: Re: The Most .... Disasters of the 20TH Century -Reply
>
>
>> Dear All,
>>
>> There have been some spectacularly calamatous events this century, no
>> doubt. I would also be interested to see a compilation of data
>> about the aggregated impacts of many more smaller disasters. I
>> suppose that a great many more people have suffered (and economic
>> losses have arisen) through the very many 'small' disasters. For
>> example, a single landslide affecting one village in the Andes, or
>> flash floods that destroy crops or a local irrigation system - these
>> go virtually unnoticed and mostly aren't even recorded on the
>> big databases (eg at CRED), but add all these small disasters up and
>> the impact far exceeds these high profile events.
>>
>> Is such a database of local disasters available at some central
>> place?
>> Dr. NICK HALL,
>> Senior Research Fellow, South Bank University, Wandsworth Road, London SW8
>2JZ, U.K.
>> tel: +44-171 815 7283; fax: 815 7366; e-mail: <[log in to unmask]>
>
>Attachment Converted: "C:\EUDORA\disasters historical EXEL.xls"
>
>Attachment Converted: "C:\EUDORA\disasters modern EXEL.xls"
>
James Lewis
Architect RIBA
Visiting Fellow in Development Studies
University of Bath
Consultant in natural hazards and human settlements
Datum International
101 High Street
Marshfield
nr Chippenham Wiltshire
SN14 8LT
United Kingdom
e-mail : [log in to unmask]
Telephone: +44 (0)1225 891 426
Fax : +44 (0)1225 892 092
e-mail also on:
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/natural-hazards-disasters/
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|
