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(IPS) - The 1990s will go down as the decade of calamities despite being declared the "International decade for natural disaster reduction" by the United Nations, says a report released in Washington.

The decade saw 86 major natural catastrophes - including floods, earthquakes and hurricanes - that required outside assistance because of extensive deaths, said the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute. By contrast, there were only 20 such events in the 1950s and 47 in the 1970s.

Natural disasters caused more than US$608 billion in economic losses during the 1990s - about five times the figure in the 1970s and 15 times the total for the 1950s, said the environmental think-tank.

Why the increase? Janet Abramovitz, a senior researcher at Worldwatch who authored the 62-page report, argued part of the reason is that a growing share of the devastation wrought by natural disasters, like floods and hurricanes, is "unnatural" in origin, caused by destruction to ecosystems.

"We have altered so many natural systems so dramatically that their ability to protect us from disturbances is greatly diminished," she said.

Natural disasters

The clear-cutting of forests, re-routing of rivers, filling in of wetlands, and destabilisation of the global climate is leading to the unravelling of a complex ecological safety net, warned the report, 'Unnatural Disasters'.

Asia has been hardest hit by natural disasters, it said, because the region is large and storms, floods and earthquakes frequently hit heavily populated coastal areas.

According to data collected by Munich Re, a German-based international reinsurance company, 77 percent of the nearly 561,000 people who died in natural disasters between 1985 and 1999 were in Asia. Approximately 45 percent of all recorded economic losses during the same period, which includes the first two years of the 'Asian financial crisis', were attributed to natural disasters.

Some of the more devastating recent natural disasters have been in India. In 1998, a cyclone in the state of Gujarat claimed the lives of 10,000 people, while the following year as many as 50,000 people died when a "super cyclone" hit Orissa state.

Munich Re reported that 10 percent of the fatalities between 1985 and 1999 were in South America, while four percent were in Central America and four percent in Africa. Less than four percent of the fatalities were in industrial countries, including European nations and the United States.

Sanitation

"While poor countries are more vulnerable, in every nation some people and communities - notably the very poor, women and ethnic minorities - are especially hard hit during and after disasters," it said.

The good news is that single natural disasters are causing fewer deaths than in earlier decades. "It was not uncommon," said Abramovitz, "to lose hundreds of thousands of lives in a single great catastrophe."

Early warnings and disaster preparedness, along with advances in sanitation and clean water, have helped keep the fatalities lower than in the past, she added.

While the death toll per event has declined in recent decades, however, the number of people impacted has grown, according to the report. More people worldwide, it said, are now displaced by natural disasters than by conflict.

"In the last decade over two billion people worldwide have been affected by disasters, about 211 million people per year," said the report, which acknowledged that some of these people may be affected and counted more than once. Ninety percent of people impacted were in Asia and six percent in Africa.

The ever-rising human and economic toll of disasters means that a profound shift is needed in how disasters are approached, said the report. Most attempts to address natural disasters, it argued, wrongly focus on disaster response and recovery or on scientific and technical solutions.

Instead, it urged governments and international institutions to re-examine development choices that have made the threats worse.

"While we cannot do away with natural hazards, we can eliminate those that we cause, minimise those we exacerbate, and reduce our vulnerability to most," said Worldwatch.

Current development trends that make people vulnerable to natural disasters - pressure on ecosystems and concentration of people and infrastructure along coasts and in cities - are growing, it added.

Deforestation

"Many ecosystems have been frayed to the point where they are no longer resilient and able to withstand natural disturbances, setting the stage for 'unnatural disasters' - those made more frequent or more severe due to human actions," it said.

Deforestation, for example, impairs watersheds, raises the risk of fires, and contributes to climate change, it said. Destruction of coastal wetlands, dunes, and mangroves eliminates "nature's shock absorbers" for coastal storms.

"Such human-made changes end up making naturally vulnerable areas - such as hillsides, rivers, coastal zones, and low-lying islands - even more vulnerable to extreme weather events," the report said.

Critical to redirecting disaster mitigation strategies, governments and donors need to focus more on maintaining and restoring healthy ecosystems, it argued. Much can be learned from China, which now recognises that forests are more valuable for flood control and water supply than for timber.

In response to deadly floods in 1998, China banned logging in the upper Yangtze watershed, prohibited additional land reclamation projects in the river's floodplain, and stepped up efforts to reforest the watershed.

Mangrove restoration efforts in Vietnam also are under way to help prevent storm damage to the coast. The 2,000 hectares of mangroves successfully acted as a buffer against frequent coastal storms, said the report.

When the area was hit by the worst typhoon in a decade, there was no significant damage, it noted.

"If we instead choose to work with nature and each other, we can reduce the waves of unnatural disasters that have been washing over the shores of humanity with increasing regularity and ferocity," said Abramovitz.