PRESENT STATUS AND TRENDS OF NATURAL HAZARDS IN THE ASIA- PACIFIC REGION

摘要

The Asia-Pacific region is prone to a wide variety of disasters caused by natural hazards. According to the EM-DAT database, between 1975-2006, while the region experienced 37% of number of world's disasters and 44% of economic losses, it suffered more than 57% of total number of global mortality and 88% of the affected populations. Unfortunately, this trend has continued in subsequent years and in 2008 alone, out of the 10 worst disasters in terms of total human losses nine occurred in the Asia-Pacific region and consequently 98% of people killed by disasters worldwide were from Asia. The same year witnessed two disasters of historical dimension, Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar and the Wenchuan earthquake in China, both in Asia, causing large-scale death and destruction. Asia-Pacific region is particularly prone to climate-sensitive hydro-meteorological disasters such as floods (35%), windstorms (28%) and water-induced landslides (8%). The global distribution shows that Asia-Pacific region is accounted for more than 45% of the world's water-related disaster fatalities during the period from 1980 to 2009, and 90% of all water-related casualties. A comparison between earthquakes and climate sensitive hydro-meteorological disasters was done for the region for the time period 1980-2009 using EM-DAT and it was found that the increase in the number of climate sensitive disasters is much higher than the increase in the number of earthquakes. In 1980, there were 11 reported earthquake disasters compared to 55 climate sensitive disasters (a difference of 44), whereas in 2009, 15 earthquakes vs. 124 climate sensitive disasters (a difference of 109).