THE world, we know, is growing more dangerous. The number and severity of natural disasters has increased since the 1960s. Population growth and poverty force more and more people to live in inadequate shelters in disaster-prone areas which makes hurricanes, floods and wildfires ever more deadly. This week, we have been watching relief efforts to help people left homeless and bereaved by an earthquake in Pakistan and a hurricane in Central America. Is this really the best we can do?
Stan was a category 1 hurricane, the least powerful, yet it may well have killed more people than hurricane Katrina, the category 4 hurricane that devastated New Orleans. Even if the precise route of the storm was not known, there should have been plenty of warning. People living in areas prone to floods and mud slides could have been warned to move to refuges on higher ground.
Earthquakes are more problematic. Predicting when and where they will strike has proved impossible. Yet there was a clear warning that India and Pakistan could have heeded. In 2001, geologists noted that the southern boundary of the Himalayas was overdue for several large earthquakes (鈥淥ne disastrous slip鈥︹��). The authorities could have made sure residents and the military knew what to do in the event of a quake, and that emergency provisions 鈥� tents, blankets and food 鈥� were stored nearby.
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They could also have stopped people building in risky places and enforced better building design. The 2001 earthquake at the Indian city of Bhuj, near the Pakistani border, should have been a wake-up call to both countries that their building codes were inadequate or not being properly enforced. In Pakistan and Kashmir things were, sadly, no better.
None of these remedies is particularly costly or difficult to do. The UN鈥檚 International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) is built around sharing such knowledge with public authorities around the world, and through them raising public awareness.
Why is this not working? The answer may lie in why equivalent natural disasters tend to kill disproportionately more people in poor countries than in rich nations. A key reason for this is the low quality of institutions in poor countries, from government departments to local planning offices. And these are the very institutions on which implementation of the ISDR depends.
It is time for a rethink. If scientific and technical information is not getting through, perhaps it should be assimilated by a UN body and advice distributed to at-risk nations. This might seem a huge undertaking, but the alternative is to wait for these institutions to mature. How long that will take is anyone鈥檚 guess. All the more so when a natural disaster can set back a poor country鈥檚 hard-won development by a decade.
