Natural disasters to cost $314 billion!

New York: In the run up to the third global conference on disaster risk reduction, a UN body has released an estimate of how much governments need to set aside to make up for losses caused by natural disasters. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), in a report, has said as much as US $314 billion will have to be spent every year to meet annual average losses from just earthquakes, tsunamis, tropical cyclones and river flooding.The report has come as an alarm for nations that are meeting at the third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, which began at Sendai city in Japan on Saturday.

With over 8,000 expected delegates, it marked the launch of a new global Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction that will replace the 10-year Hyogo Framework for Action adopted at a 2005 UN conference in Kobe. At Sendai, countries are expected to announce their commitments on reducing the impact of disasters, which have claimed over 1.3 million lives and cost the global economy at least $2 trillion in the past 20 years.The report is well-timed and provides a big message it is high-time the world focuses on managing risks than just managing the number of disasters. Small costs, big gainsThe report, Making Development Sustainable: The Future of Disaster Risk Management, provides a sober review of the 10 years which have passed since the last world conference on disaster risk reduction at Kobe in Japan when nations adopted the Hyogo Framework for Action, the global guide for disaster risk management.

According to the report estimates, an investment of US $6 billion annually in disaster risk management would result in avoided losses of US $360 billion over the next 15 years (till 2030). It states that this US $6 billion is just 0.1 per cent of total forecast expenditure of US $6 trillion annually on new infrastructure.While launching the report , UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that “growing global inequality, increasing exposure to natural hazards, rapid urbanization and the overconsumption of energy and natural resources threaten to drive risk to dangerous and unpredictable levels with systemic global impacts.”

Margareta Wahlström, head of UNISDR, said: “The 2015 Global Assessment Report demonstrates clearly that many countries face significant challenges because of their inability to manage the fiscal burden created by large-scale disaster events. She said “700,000 people have died in disaster events over the last ten years. A total of 1.7 billion people have had their lives disrupted in some way. It is of great concern that economic losses in major reported disaster events come to $1.4 trillion.” (Down To Earth)