GENEVA—The world is "sleepwalking" toward preventable natural
disasters whose effects could be cut significantly with a modest increase in
spending on risk reduction, the United Nations aid chief said on Tuesday.
"The trends in disasters, particularly from climate change,
are of enormous concern," said John Holmes, UN undersecretary-general for
humanitarian affairs.
"We can only expect that this kind of trend is going to
continue," he told a news conference.
Holmes was speaking at the start of a four-day Global
Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction which gathers over 1,800 participants from
169 governments and around 140 international and non-governmental organizations.
Risk reduction efforts had improved since the 2004 Indian
Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 250,000 people, but much more was needed,
Holmes said.
"We’re still to some extent sleepwalking our way into
disasters for the future which we know are going to happen, and not enough is
being done to mitigate the damage," he said.
Holmes hoped the Global Platform would agree to spend around
$3 billion a year on disaster risk reduction, representing about 10 percent of
the $8 billion spent each year on disaster relief, plus 1 percent of the $239
billion development aid budget.
By comparison, disasters in 2008 caused approximately $200
billion in damage, Holmes said.
While the cost two years earlier was a quarter of that, the
trend was clearly rising.
"The most damaging disasters in developing countries can seem
to cause the least damage because the property being damaged is less expensive
... but the real damage done to lives and livelihoods is much greater," Holmes
said.
It was important global efforts to deal with climate change
include disaster risk reduction and look at adapting behavior as well as
mitigating the effects of disasters, he said.
About 90 percent of disasters are climate-related, said
Holmes, who noted cyclones in Brazil in 2004 and Oman in 2007 had been of an
intensity never before seen in those regions.
The massive earthquake in Sichuan, China, last year, and
another earthquake in Italy this year had shown both the need for tough building
codes and the importance of enforcing them. - Reuters
