chapter 4 - DRK

Strictly under embargo until Wednesday 22 September at 00:01 GMT (02:01 Geneva time)were malnourished, compared with 16 per cent in non-slum urban areas. Since income inurban areas is strongly tied to the opportunity for work, disasters can quickly impact on afamily’s wages and purchasing power for food. Furthermore, since people in cities spend adisproportionate amount of their income on other expenses, such as rent, utilities, transportand education, this leaves an insufficient budget for food. Research in Bangladeshduring the recent commodities crisis shows that in March 2007, daily labourers in urbanareas were able to purchase 5 to 7 kilograms of rice for one day of work, yet one year later,the same day’s work purchased only 3.7 to 5 kg of rice, the main staple food.Box 2.1 Tropical Storm Ketsana and urban food insecurityTropical Storm Ketsana struck the Philippines on26 September 2009 with torrential rains, theheaviest in more than 40 years, causing severeflooding and massive population displacementin urban areas, but also in the surrounding countryside.The joint UN rapid needs assessmentindicated that Luzon, a highly populated islandin the north of the country, inhabited by 56 percent of the total population of the Philippines,had been the hardest hit. More than 2.2 millionpeople were reported directly affected by thetyphoon and approximately 736,000 peoplewere displaced (390,000 staying in 561 evacuationcentres and 346,581 with host families).Most households lost their assets and livelihoods.Estimates indicate that more than 36,728 hectaresof rice fields and 541 hectares of plantationsof high-value commercial crops in centralLuzon were damaged by the heavy rains andflooding caused by the storm. Tropical Storm Ketsanadestroyed about US$ 33 million worth ofroads and bridges, with Metro Manila and centralLuzon the worst hit, leading to major disruptionof food supplies and spikes in food prices. Four visions of urban riskThe definition of what constitutes a disaster, and whether small and everyday disasterevents are included, is important in portraying an accurate vision of risk in cities. Moreproblematic is trying to compare disaster risk across cities and across urban areas indifferent countries. For this, information is most readily available for large cities, andin fact large cities and mega-cities have been the subject of several efforts to understandglobal urban risk. The DesInventar database, which now includes several countries,offers some detailed information that can contribute to a better understanding of riskat the urban district level, but the approach needs to be more widely adopted in orderto provide a more sophisticated understanding of risk across cities.Vision one: Asset exposure to multi-hazardsin large citiesMunich Re Group’s NatCat database was used to prepare a natural hazard risk indexfor 50 of the world’s largest (over 2 million population) and most economically importantcities (city GDP as a percentage of a country’s GDP). The index analysed 3038