RUSSIAN JOURNAL OF EARTH SCIENCES VOL. 10, ES1004, doi:10.2205/2007ES000267, 2008
[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.
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Figure 1 |
[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.
Citation: 2008), Damage from natural disasters: Fast growth of losses or stable ratio?, Russ. J. Earth Sci., 10, ES1004, doi:10.2205/2007ES000267.
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