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dam-l "Natural disasters not natural/LS
>From ENS:
"Natural" Disasters a Misnomer, UN Leader Says
GENEVA, Switzerland, July 6, 1999 (ENS) - "It is a
tragic irony that 1998, the penultimate year of the
Disaster Reduction Decade, was also a year in
which natural disasters increased so dramatically," United Nations
Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Monday. Annan
was speaking at the closing ceremonies for the United Nations
International Decade for Natural Disaster
Reduction (IDNDR) at the International Conference Centre of Geneva.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (Photo courtesy UN)
"It is becoming increasingly clear that term
'natural' for such events is a
misnomer," Annan said. Ecological imbalances
brought on by poor
development practices and climate change are
responsible for much of the loss
of life, displacement and destruction that follows
floods, storms, earthquakes
and droughts, the secretary-general pointed out.
Much has been learned from the creative disaster
prevention efforts of poor
communities in developing countries, said Annan,
for it is the poor who live
most directly in harm's way due to population
pressures. They must live on
flood plains, in earthquake-prone zones and on
unstable hillsides. "Their
extraordinary vulnerability is perhaps the single
most important cause of
disaster casualties," said Annan.
The cost of weather-related disasters in 1998
alone exceeded the cost of all
such disasters in the whole of the 1980s. Tens of
thousands of mostly poor
people died in storms, floods, earthquakes and
droughts. Tens of millions
have been temporarily or permanently displaced.
The cost of disasters in the 1990s was some nine times higher than
in the 1960s, Annan said.
In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Mexican emergency
workers search flood-damaged office building for
survivors and dead on October 28, 1998 after
Hurricane Mitch swept Central America. (Photo
courtesy Inter-American Development Bank)
"No doubt there will always be genuinely natural
hazards -
whether floods, droughts, storms or earthquakes.
But today's
disasters are sometimes manmade, and nearly always
exacerbated by human action - or inaction," he said.
Disasters can be made worse by faulty development
practices.
Massive logging operations reduce the soil's
ability to absorb
heavy rainfall. That, in turn, makes erosion and
flooding more
likely. The destruction of wetlands reduces the
land's capacity to
absorb heavy run-off, he explained, preaching to
the choir.
"Extreme climatic events may also be caused in
part by global
warming, which is, in turn, partly caused by
increased carbon
emissions from burning fossil fuels. Can it really be a
coincidence that 1998 was the warmest year
recorded since
worldwide measurements were first taken some 150
years ago?"
Annan asked rhetorically.
The secretary-general called for a shift from "a
culture of reaction to a culture of prevention."
He urged better early-warning of impending
disasters to give vulnerable people time to move out of harm's way and
better policies to mitigate the effects of natural
disasters.
One of
many families sorts
their
belongings in San Pedro
Sula,
Honduras in the wake of
Hurricane Mitch. (Photo by
Alvaro
Gutierrez courtesy
honduras.com)
But
above all, said Annan, prevention
"means
greater efforts to reduce
vulnerability in the first place.
Unfortunately, such efforts rarely
receive much publicity and thus too
often
fail to engage the attention of
top
policy makers."
The
scientific community understands
the
importance of the connection
between natural disasters, climate
change, and land use, he said. The
challenge now is to communicate this
understanding more effectively to
citizens and policy makers.
"Real
progress will require Member
States, NGOs and international organizations to
work together on advocacy, networking and consensus-building,
creating the sorts of global coalition that we saw
in the campaigns to ban landmines and establish the International
Criminal Court."
Annan expressed gratitude to the IDNDR team in
Geneva, and its partners in and outside the United Nations system.
"Around the world, an interdisciplinary scientific
community of meteorologists, geologists, seismologists and
social scientists is working ever more cohesively.
Despite its limited financial resources, IDNDR has also brought
together governments, NGOs, other international
organizations and the private sector to work with the scientific
community on disaster reduction strategies." "We
know what has to be done. What is now required is the political
commitment to do it," he declared.
© Environment News Service (ENS) 1999. All Rights
Reserved.
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Lori Pottinger, Director, Southern Africa Program,
and Editor, World Rivers Review
International Rivers Network
1847 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94703, USA
Tel. (510) 848 1155 Fax (510) 848 1008
http://www.irn.org
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