Could the US election be the world’s ticket to better disaster preparedness?
- The world has been woefully unprepared for the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as weather tragedies related to climate change. The right man in the White House could change things for the better
To celebrate the real day for disaster risk reduction, the United Nations released an intriguing overview of the human cost of disasters in the 20 years since 2000. Observing a “staggering rise in climate-related disasters”, its research team is suffused with gloom: “It is baffling that we willingly and knowingly continue to sow the seeds of our own destruction…”
The UN relies on the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) and its emergency events database, which has been tracking disasters since 1900 – but this means it excludes man-made disasters like wars or nuclear accidents, and biological disasters like pandemics and flu epidemics.
How this omission affects its conclusions over the past century must no doubt be the subject of another study, but it is inconvenient as we wrestle for insights on dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. It also makes the disaster numbers look smaller.
While the number of lives lost to disasters has remained steady compared with the two decades from 1980-2000, partly because of improving preparedness and better weather forecasting, the total number of disasters has jumped by 74 per cent, and the economic costs by 82 per cent.