chapter 4 - DRK

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Strictly under embargo until Wednesday 22 September at 00:01 GMT (02:01 Geneva time)36CHAPTER 299million people per year between 2000 and 2008. While we do not know how manypeople affected by floods live in urban areas, we can understand that it must be a significantproportion.While it is possible to identify certain disasters as urban disasters, it becomes morecomplicated to assess what proportion of the total losses of a disaster are in urban areasand what proportion are outside the urban areas. At the global or regional scale, wehave little sense of what proportion of deaths and injuries are within urban centres.For instance, Cyclone Nargis caused an estimated 140,000 deaths in Myanmar andhad serious impacts in urban centres including Yangon, but we have little idea of whatproportion of these impacts were in urban areas.Precise information about impacts in urban areas for a disaster that affected a region isnot widely reported, yet it is important in order to understand who, and what, has beenaffected. Consider, for example, the 1988 floods in Bangladesh, which inundated 52 percent of the country. This flood also impacted Dhaka, the nation’s capital, which then hadabout 6 million residents. Flood waters covered 85 per cent of the city for several weeks.For two weeks Dhaka was completely cut off, with depths of inundation ranging from0.3 to more than 4.5 metres. Across the country, 45 million people, of a total populationof 110 million, were affected by the floods. It is estimated that between 2.2 and 4million of the affected were in Dhaka, or some 30 to 60 per cent of the city’s population.The total death toll is reported to have been around 2,379 deaths for all the affectedregions with 150 deaths in Dhaka. Ten years later, in 1998, floods again affected Dhaka,covering large portions of the city for a two-month period. An estimated 918 peopledied in the 1998 floods, but the number of deaths, if any, that occurred in the capitalwas not reported. We do know that 30 per cent of housing in the Dhaka metropolitanarea sustained damage, and that almost 32 per cent of damages were to houses of thevery poor, while 36 per cent of houses belonging to lower-middle class and poor peoplewere damaged. In one sense, distinguishing between rural and urban deaths and injuriesmight be considered inappropriate in that disaster risk reduction should seek to preventthem all. But this lack of a more spatially precise idea of where deaths and injuries occuralso hinders an understanding of where and how risk reduction should take place.Cities are affected by a wide range of disaster events, which extend beyond our conceptionof ‘natural’ hazards. In African Cities of Hope and Risk, Ben Wisner and MarkPelling used the data available from CRED to identify 166 urban disasters affecting28 African cities between 1997 and 2008. They identified natural hazards such asurban drought, earthquakes, windstorms, floods and extreme temperatures. Floodsare most represented in the data, accounting for one-third of the total 3.3 millionpeople affected by urban disasters in Africa. However, disasters in cities are also largelytechnological hazards. A review of urban disasters shows the wide range of disastersthat occur in African cities, such as aircraft crashes, fires and explosions, ferry-boatsinkings, subsidence and sink holes, illegal dumping of hazardous materials, shack
Strictly under embargo until Wednesday 22 September at 00:01 GMT (02:01 Geneva time)fires and traffic accidents. Building collapses, documented from a media review, showthat in a two-year period (from 2006 to 2008), nine building collapses killed at least100 people. Cities are also the locus of social hazards such as violent crime, riots andterrorism, as well as public health hazards such as HIV / AIDS, which has a higher incidencein cities. Epidemics are a major disaster affecting people in African cities, andit was found that 300,000 people were affected by urban epidemics over the period,linked to poor water quality, inadequate sanitation and flooding.Food insecurity is another type of disaster event that is now recognized as seriously affectingurban dwellers. Urban food insecurity may be a cumulative effect caused by otherdisaster events (see Box 2.1 on food security and Tropical Storm Ketsana) or it may becaused by international economic conditions, such as the rise in food and fuel prices thatpeaked in mid-2008. Large-scale disasters, especially flooding and droughts, may reducefood availability in cities, however urban food insecurity is, for the most part, consideredto be a food access problem, rather than a food availability problem. Generally food isavailable in cities, but the poor cannot afford to buy it, either because prices are too highor their incomes have decreased due to lack of work. UN-Habitat’s data on malnutritionin urban areas collected between 1990 and 2007 show that serious malnutrition has beenwidespread in urban slums of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2007, inthe Democratic Republic of the Congo, 41 per cent of children from poor urban areasMore than 56 percent of the populationof the Philippines,including inhabitantsof the capital, Manila,live on the island ofLuzon. In September2009, Tropical StormKetsana broughttorrential rain to thearea, causing theworst floods in morethan 40 years.© IFRCWorld Disasters Report 2010 – Focus on urban risk37
Page 1 and 2: Strictly under embargo untilWednesd
Page 4 and 5: A global humanitarian organizationT
Page 6 and 7: Strictly under embargo until Wednes
Page 8: Strictly under embargo until Wednes
Page 91 and 92:
Strictly under embargo until Wednes
Page 93 and 94:
Page 95 and 96:
Page 97 and 98:
Page 99 and 100:
Page 101:
Page 106 and 107:
Page 108 and 109:
Page 110 and 111:
Page 112 and 113:
Page 114 and 115:
Page 116 and 117:
Page 118 and 119:
114CHAPTER 6Strictly under embargo
Page 120 and 121:
Page 122 and 123:
Page 124 and 125:
Page 126 and 127:
Page 128 and 129:
Page 130 and 131:
Page 132 and 133:
Page 134 and 135:
Page 136 and 137:
Page 138 and 139:
Page 140 and 141:
Page 142 and 143:
138CHAPTER 7Strictly under embargo
Page 144 and 145:
Page 146 and 147:
Page 148 and 149:
Page 150 and 151:
Page 152 and 153:
Page 154 and 155:
Page 156 and 157:
Page 158 and 159:
Page 160 and 161:
Page 162 and 163:
Page 164 and 165:
Page 166 and 167:
Page 168 and 169:
Page 170 and 171:
Page 172 and 173:
Page 174 and 175:
Page 176 and 177:
Page 178 and 179:
Page 180 and 181:
Page 182 and 183:
Page 184 and 185:
Page 186 and 187:
Page 188 and 189:
Page 190 and 191:
Page 192 and 193:
Page 194 and 195:
190ANNEX 2Strictly under embargo un
Page 196 and 197:
Page 198 and 199:
Page 200 and 201:
Page 202 and 203:
Page 204 and 205:
Page 206 and 207:
Page 208 and 209:
Page 210 and 211:
Page 212 and 213:
Page 214 and 215:
Page 216 and 217:
Page 218 and 219:
214INDEXStrictly under embargo unti
Page 220:
The International Federationof Red
show all

chapter 4 - DRK

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?