Photo by Flickr user, Jun Teramoto, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)
"The risk of losing wealth in disasters is actually increasing faster than that wealth is being created," said Andrew Maskrey, co-ordinator of the 2011 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction launched today at the Third Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Reduction 2011 in Geneva, Switzerland.
"I think we're now seeing the fruits both of improved development conditions in many countries as well as improvements in disaster preparedness, response and early warning systems," he said whilst noting that most governments still hesitate to do longer-term planning for disasters.