ABSTRACT
About 15 per cent of the world’s population is at risk from tropical cyclones. Many are in the LDCs where about 100 million people live in coastal zones at elevations less than 10 m above mean sea level. Tropical cyclones are responsible for most of the deaths attributed to ‘windstorms’, although most of the associated deaths are due to drowning in the storm surge. One estimate of the global economic loss from such storms was US$10 billion annually at 1995 values (Pielke and Pielke, 1997). Like other hazards, tropical cyclones bring benefits as well as losses. For example, there is a tendency for tropical cyclones to end drought in Australia and elsewhere.
