Story of the month ...

November 2011: The likely increase of disasters triggered by natural hazards: While there is an enormous international effort to reduse the risk of disasters caused by natural hazards such as droughts, floods, storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, volcano eruptions, etc., we see an increase of disasters over time. For meteorological and hydrological hazards, this trend may be partly due to a changing climate. However, for what we call geohazards, no such trend in hazards is causing the increase in disasters. At the ESF conference on “Understanding Extreme Geohazards: The Science of the Disaster Risk Management Cycle”, which at the time of this writing is taking place in Spain (see conference web page, several speakers underlined that this increase is solely anthropogenic: (1) ignoring the knowledge of geohazards accumulated by past generations and detailed over recent decades of extensive research, our built environment is sprawling into hazardous areas; (2) in many parts of the world, particularly those developing and even more so, those striken by poverty, the buildings are not adapted to the hazards, and vulnerability is extremely high; (3) corruption particularly in the construction industry leads to a situation where buildings that should be shelters for humans and provide them with a safe environment turn into “weapons of mass destruction” that will kill many, many people during future hazardous events. Very likely, we have not yet seen the worst disasters caused by geohazards. Theran, Istanbul, Mexico City, and Goma are but a few locations were geohazards easily can harvest death tools of 1 million and more - only because we put people in harm's way.

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