And businesses and international financial institutions should join in a worldwide effort to head off or at least lessen the impact of floods, storms and earthquakes, Margareta Wahlstrom said.
“Today’s urban planning demands foresight and much more attention to disaster risk,” she told a news conference marking International Day for Disaster Reduction.
“Poorly built houses, schools and hospitals on floodplains, above seismic fault lines and along fragile slopes expose millions of people to disasters that can be avoided.”
Wahlstrom, special representative on the issue for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said that with global warming the number of disasters was increasing. “Their cost is climbing dramatically from year to year,” she added.
From January to the end of September this year, there had been some 235 natural disasters around the world killing more than 236,000 people and affecting 256 million, the Swedish UN humanitarian relief specialist said.
These events, she said, were estimated to have cost mainly poor countries $81 billion in losses of infrastructure and property, less than a third of which were covered by insurance, according to industry figures.
As cities grew, especially those on coastal plains and near mountainous areas, the potential for major catastrophes increased. By 2030, some 60 percent of the world’s population would be living in urban centers, many in vulnerable slum areas.
She pointed to earthquakes this year in Haiti, Chile and New Zealand as examples of how advance planning, strict building regulations and land-use rules could save lives and reduce destruction of services such as hospitals and schools.
In Chile, a quake of force 8.8 killed one person out of every 595 affected. The quake in Haiti, 500 times less powerful, killed one person in 15 of those in the areas it hit, with shanty towns compounding the disaster, Wahlstrom said.
In Christchurch, near the center of the New Zealand quake but a city where strict building regulations were enforced and emergency management was well developed, no one died, she said.
