RUSSIAN JOURNAL OF EARTH SCIENCES VOL. 10, ES1004, doi:10.2205/2007ES000267, 2008

Introduction

[2]  Mass media is abound in information about natural disasters: hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, droughts occur in one or another place of the globe. Consequences of such disasters sometimes are horrific. So, the death toll of the 2004 Sumatra earthquake amounted to 320 thousand people, in the Tien Shan 1976 earthquake in China according to different sources there were as many as 240 to 650 thousand. During floods in China and Bangladesh in 1931 and 1970, casualties numbered 1300 and 500 thousand, respectively. For the development of the mankind it is important to understand a recurrence pattern of natural disasters and to predict a possible damage.

2007ES000267-fig01
Figure 1
[3]  Many authors have studied changes in tendencies of damage amount from natural disasters. Based on the data reported at the World Conference on Natural Disasters held in Yokohama (1994), the number of disasters over a period of 1962-1992 increased by a factor 4.1 as this takes place, the damage amount increases on the average to 6% a year and a number of casualties rises to 4.3% [Vorobiev et al., 2000]. Based on such statements, there comes unfavorable forecast, that by the end of the XXI century all the economic gain will be taken up by growing losses from natural disasters [Osipov, 2001, 2002; etc.]. Figure 1 provides an example of such a regularity (after data-base EM-DAT: International Disaster Data-base, http://www.em-dat.net) inferred from global data on the number of major disasters and resulted damage amount. A tendency to disaster growth in number and damage amount from disasters is used to assign to increases in population, development of potentially hazardous industries, general worsening of geoenvironment, and involving into operating economy of less environmentally friendly territories.

[4]  However, the statistical approach used in the analysis of disaster pattern and hence the prediction results are not quite correct. The problem is the presence of occasional anomalously great damage amount comparable with net damage estimates. So, the death toll from the two above mentioned - Tien Shan and Sumatra earthquakes - amounts to about one-third of casualties from earthquakes for the entire XX century. Such a comparison makes one think that the conventional approach based on calculation of average values cannot give reliable estimates, hence other statistical approaches are required to study the damage pattern from disasters. The correct analysis of the damage pattern is given below, so the character of the resultant prediction will undergo a qualitative change. Thus, the prediction of not disastrous growth, but a model of quasi-stationary relative damage values tending to decrease with fast social-economic development seems a more justified.


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Citation: Rodkin, M. V., and V. F. Pisarenko (2008), Damage from natural disasters: Fast growth of losses or stable ratio?, Russ. J. Earth Sci., 10, ES1004, doi:10.2205/2007ES000267.

Copyright 2008 by the Russian Journal of Earth Sciences

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