Disaster by the numbers

Natural disasters are on the increase, and so are the lives affected by homelessness and injury, although modern medical care and improved disaster response have reduced the number of lives lost, Debarati Guha Sapir, director of the Brussels-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster (CRED) said, as reported by the Harvard Gazette.

Sapir added that some of the dramatic increase in natural disasters observed since 1950 — up to 400 in 2011 from 50 in 1950 — is due to improved communications and reporting in remote places that used to be invisible to the international community. Still, a comparison of geophysical disasters such as earthquakes  with climate-related disasters such as hurricanes and floods show a much greater increase in the climate-related kinds.

Sapir cautioned against using financial losses as a measure of a disaster’s impact, reasoning that those figures are often provided by insurance companies. And in poor, developing nations insurance is not common. While the Japan quake and tsunami in 2011 amounted to $210 billion in losses, 57.4 percent of the $366 billion in disaster losses globally that year, the Haiti 2010 earthquake would have registered low on that scale, because so many of the 225,000 dead had little of value. “Using analysis of economic losses is fraught with misunderstanding,” Sapir said.