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09/17/2004:

"UN: Disasters on the rise"

Hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters hit a growing number of people worldwide and are on the increase due partly to global warming, the United Nations' disaster reduction agency said on Friday.

More than 254 million people were affected by natural hazards last year, a near three-fold jump from 1990, according to data released by the inter-agency secretariat of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR).

The random nature of disasters renders mapping their impact more difficult as droughts in 2002 pushed the figure of people affected above 734 million.

But the long-term trend over the past decade shows a steady rise in victims, according to the statistics from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaters at the University of Louvain in Belgium.

"Not only is the world globally facing more potential disasters, but increasing numbers of people are becoming vulnerable to hazards," the UN/ISDR said in a statement.

Hazards, ranging from storms, earthquakes and volcanoes to wild fires, droughts and landslides killed some 83,000 people in 2003 compared with about 53,000 deaths 13 years earlier, it noted.

A lack of facilities such as schools, jobs and hospitals in rural communities is forcing more and more people to live in urban areas where they stand a greater risk of being affected, said UN/ISDR director Salvano Briceno.

"Urban migrants settle in exposed stretches of land either on seismic faults, flooding plains or on landslide prone slopes," he said in a statement.

In addition, cyclones and freak temperatures appear to be on the rise with 337 natural disasters reported in 2003 up from 261 in 1990, the agency said.

"The urban concentration, the effects of climate change and the environmental degredation are greaty increasing vulnerability," said Briceno.

"Alarmingly, this is getting worse," he warned.

An onslaught of deadly hurricanes that have battered the southern United States supported theories that such storms were occurring more frequently, said John Harding, a programme officer at the UN/ISDR.

"Look at the number of hurricanes this year, it is hard to keep up with all the names," he told AFP.

"The scientific community tells us that the intensity and frequency of disasters are very likely to increase in the medium-term due to climate change and that increase may well be occurring at this stage," he said.

drudgereport.com