Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2015
Making development sustainable: The future of disaster risk management


background image
The standard way in which disaster damage is measured involves a separate examination of the number of fatalities, injuries, and people otherwise affected, and the financial damage that natural disasters cause. A new way to aggregate measures of disaster impact aims to overcome many of the difficulties previously identified in the literature, including the difficulty of assessing overall disaster impact, the need to conduct costbenefit analyses that take different disaster impacts into account, and the problem of assessing damage relative to its value in different countries.

Despite some conceptual differences, the new approach proposed is similar to the World Health Organization’s calculation of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) lost from the burden of diseases and injuries.
3 All measures of disaster impact are converted into “life years” to allow a worldwide comparison of trends in disaster losses. The advantage of this new measurement is that it accounts for the more general impact of disasters on human welfare and enables a comparison of these impacts across the globe.4
40
Part I
(Source: GAR 13 paperNoy, 2014

GAR13 Reference Noy, Ilan. 2014,A New Non-Monetary Global Measure of the Direct Impact of Natural Disasters, Background Paper prepared for the 2015 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction. Geneva, Switzerland: UNISDR..
Click here to view this GAR paper.
.)
Box I.1 An innovative way to measure disaster impact
As the HFA comes to its close, all the indications are that its expected outcome, to achieve “The substantial reduction of disaster losses, in lives and in the social and economic assets of communities and countries”, has only been partially achieved.
Disaster mortality remains high: 1.6 million people have died in internationally reported disasters since the start of the IDNDR in 1990, making for an average of around 65,000 deaths per year. Yet this number is far less than the average of 1.24 million deaths in traffic accidents every year1 or the average of 1 million who die from tuberculosis every year. From that perspective, disaster mortality could be considered a less critical global problem than disease or accidents.
Economic losses from internationally reported disasters have also grown steadily since 1990, reaching an estimated annual average of US$200 billion (Munich Re., 2013

Munich Re. 2013,2013 Natural Catastrophe Year in Review, January 2014. Munich.. .
). However, this is only a fraction of global GDP, which was close to US$75 trillion in 2013,
2 and fails to ring the same alarm bells as the US$4 trillion in losses to the banking sector during the global financial crisis of 20072009 (IMF, 2009

IMF (International Monetary Fund). 2009,Global Financial Stability Report: Responding to the Financial Crisis and Measuring Systemic Risks, World Economic and Financial Surveys. April 2009. Washington, D.C.. .
).
Part of the reason why disaster losses have not created the same political or economic
imperative to address the risks of disease or financial risks may be the way in which they are measured. In reality, disasters affect households, communities and countries due to the combined impact of mortality, morbidity and damaged or destroyed housing, infrastructure and agriculture. Separate measurements of mortality and economic loss fail to capture the full dimensions of disaster.
To address this problem, and for illustrative purposes, the concept of human life years can be used to provide a better representation of disaster impact, as it provides a metric describing the time required to produce economic development and social progress. The loss of human life years, be it through disasters, disease or accidents, is therefore a way of measuring setbacks to social and economic development (Box I.1).
When disaster losses are expressed using human life years as a common currency (GAR 13 paperNoy, 2014

GAR13 Reference Noy, Ilan. 2014,A New Non-Monetary Global Measure of the Direct Impact of Natural Disasters, Background Paper prepared for the 2015 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction. Geneva, Switzerland: UNISDR..
Click here to view this GAR paper.
), their potential scale comes into clearer focus. Between 1980 and 2012, more than 1.3 billion life years were lost worldwide in internationally reported disasters (ibid.), making for an annual average of 42 million life years. Expressed in this way, disaster loss is roughly equivalent to the 43 million life years lost annually from tuberculosis, about 20 per cent lower than the life years lost
Previous page Previous Section  
Contact us  |  Disclaimer  |  Our Partners  |  References  |  Acknowledgements  |  PreventionWeb |  WCDRR  |  © United Nations 2015.