Humans also to blame for Asia’s natural disasters
Environmental damage, shoddy urban planning, corruption and other
man-made problems are magnifying the human cost of natural disasters
almost every time they strike in Asia, experts said.
Thousands of people have died across the region last week in a
relentless string of events that at first may seem to be the fault of
Mother Nature, but the enormous death tolls can be equally blamed on
people, they said.
Rafael Senga, a Filipino environmental expert with the World Wildlife
Fund, said deforestation, the ever-expanding number of people living in
dangerously planned cities and man-made induced climate change were all
major problems.
Deforestation |
“It’s a combination of factors that can lead to a perfect storm for
disaster in the region,” Senga told AFP by phone from Bangkok, where he
is attending United Nations climate change talks.
“The aggravating effect of environmental degradation, deforestation
and climate change is massive.”
In the Philippines, more than 270 people died as tropical storm
Ketsana pounded the nation’s capital, Manila, and the government was
quick to point out that those rains were the heaviest in more than four
decades.
But, in a flood-prone city, it was no surprise that many of the
people killed were from over-crowded shanty towns built along rivers
with extremely poor drainage.
Residents of Marikina town east of Manila, which was among those
badly hit by the flooding, also noticed that the floodwaters were
thickened by soil apparently washed down from surrounding mountains that
had been logged.
“It was not water that flooded us. It was mud,” said Joanna Remo,
chief medical doctor at the Amang Rodriquez Medical Center in Marikina.
Meanwhile, thousands of people are believed to have died in the
Indonesian city of Padang following a 7.6-magnitude earthquake on
Wednesday.
But geologists have long said Padang was highly likely to suffer a
major quake, yet it housed nearly a million people often in poorly
constructed buildings.
Similarly, parents blamed poorly constructed school buildings for the
large number of deaths among children in last year’s quake that hit
Sichuan province, China, and killed 87,000 people in total.
The inexorable urbanisation of Asia brings with it a myriad of
problems that exacerbate natural disasters, experts say.
“The outcome of Asia’s high rate of urbanisation has been the
expansion of urban populations into geographic areas, which are
frequently affected by disaster events,” the Bangkok-based Asian
Disaster Preparedness Centre said on its website.
“The result is an increased vulnerability of populations and
infrastructure.” It said mitigation measures such as earthquake and
cyclone-resistant buildings, flood and landslide control measures and
the incorporation of disaster vulnerability into land-use planning “have
rarely been attempted in most Asian countries.”
That problem is likely to worsen.
By 2030, five billion people worldwide are projected to live in urban
areas, up from 3.3 billion in 2008, according to the Asian Development
Bank.
The number of cities with populations of more than one million each
are expected to jump to more than 500, up from only 11 from the
beginning of the last century, it said, citing UN figures.
More than half of those cities will be in Asia, it added.
A Singapore-based regional economist said Asia’s “reckless path” to
economic development as well as corruption should also be blamed for the
high number of casualties in disasters.
“In the rush to achieve high economic growth, short-cuts are
sometimes taken,” said the economist who asked not to be named because
his company had businesses in the countries involved.
AFP |