ABSTRACT
The number and consequences of natural disasters have shown dramatic developments in past decades. The number of disaster events rose from annually less than 10 in the first decade of the nineteenth century, to about 30 per year by the early 1960s. From then onward, in the 50-year timeframe that is the focus of this book, numbers first rose rapidly to more than 500 events by the year 2000, but in the past 10 years showed a declining trend (Figure 18.1). The annual total economic damage figures are more erratic, on one hand also showing a strong increase since about 1970, but with increasing high inter-annual variation owing to individual, exceptionally costly events, such as the Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the 2011 Tohoku (Japan) earthquake and tsunami event that caused damage in excess of 300 bn US$. All damage statistics must be considered with care. For one, to be included in the CRED EM-DAT database (CRED, 2014) that is the source of the preceding numbers, events either need to cause at least 10 fatalities, affect at least 100 people, or lead to a state of emergency or a call for international assistance, an arbitrary definition. Furthermore, with reporting, especially of smaller, more local events getting increasingly sketchy the further we look back (or indeed still today in more remote places, or those suffering from weak governments or from conflicts), the preceding numbers suffer from variable reliability and completeness. It is nevertheless interesting to note that the timeframe of this book appears to coincide with a new, more intense, epoch of natural disaster occurrence. The increase clearly reflects global population numbers that also started to rise rapidly around 1960 (Kerle and Alkema, 2011), and a strong growth in wealth and thus the basis for economic damage. The trend also owes to growing transparency and interest in global affairs, better 457reporting, and clearly also remote sensing has played a role. While disasters have been a focus area as long as remote sensing has existed, in particular the advent of space-based remote sensing in the 1960s (military) and 1970s (civilian) has led to better technical means to detect and assess disaster events, including events national rulers would have preferred not to be seen by the world (e.g., earthquake or flooding disasters in China in the 1970s, or the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986). Hence, remote sensing has been playing a pivotal role in allowing increasingly informed disaster risk management (DRM), and in achieving a global inventory of disaster events. Number of annual natural disasters between 1900 and 2014 in bold (primary axis), and total annual economic disaster damage for the same period in hatched line (secondary axis). https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429089435/9c570d80-7548-4c77-8c7f-d7be50eaec81/content/fig18_1.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> (From CRED: Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (2014) EMDAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disasters Data Base. Brussels, Belgium: School of Public Health, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED international disaster database, 2014.)
