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The bluffer’s guide to humanitarian disasters
18 Jan 2005
 Source: AlertNet
By Mark Jones

Mozambicans wait to be airlifted from their rooftops in March 2000.
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Mozambicans wait to be airlifted from their rooftops in March 2000.
File by PETER ANDREWS

Background

•  Food and hunger

•  Climate change

•  Disaster risk reduction

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What is a humanitarian disaster?

There’s no simple answer. The Red Cross Red Crescent movement -- the biggest humanitarian network in the world -- uses a definition from the Belgium-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters:

“…a situation or event, which overwhelms local capacity, necessitating a request to national or international level for external assistance; an unforeseen and often sudden event that causes great damage, destruction and human suffering”.

This definition stresses sudden impact disasters. There are, however, other situations which attract the help of humanitarians which can have more gradual but far graver humanitarian consequences – particularly conflict and diseases.

Unfortunately, many, if not most, humanitarian crises are made up of several kinds of disaster. Professional relief workers refer to disasters that overlap with war, civil war or other forms of civil strife as “complex emergencies”.

The U.N.’s Inter-Agency Steering Committee (IASC) defines a complex emergency as

“ … a humanitarian crisis in a country, region or society where there is total or considerable breakdown of authority resulting from internal or external conflict and which requires an international response that goes beyond the mandate or capacity of any single agency …”

What are the main types of humanitarian disaster?

Disease This is the biggest killer. AIDS, diarrhoea, tuberculosis and malaria are just the top four in a long list of lethal epidemics and communicable diseases which disproportionately impact the least developed countries.

Famine/drought Food and water shortages may not be as deadly as disease but they affect huge swathes of the global population.

Hunger is often caused by bad distribution or government mismanagement, rather than production shortages, so a lot of aid specialists argue that famine is rarely an entirely natural disaster.

Conflict At any one time there are many conflicts raging, most receiving little media attention. While deaths from conflict are, comparatively speaking, few, the number of people affected is huge.

Among the people fleeing conflict, refugees are legally defined by Geneva Conventions as those who go to another country, while internally displaced people are those who are forced to leave their homes but do not cross an internationally recongnised border.

Natural disasters These are the disasters that tend to capture most of the media coverage – sudden onset crises which appear to be caused by natural forces like floods and earthquakes. But they are not the biggest killers.

There is some debate over whether extreme weather events -- heat waves and cold waves – which attract the attention of humanitarian relief agencies should be classified as natural disasters or not.

Technological disasters The purest form of man-made disasters. The best-known of these are the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl (Ukraine) of 1986 and the Bhopal (India) chemical poisoning of 1984.

Which disasters have the biggest impact? Disease is the biggest killer but gets little attention in the media. Natural disasters kill relatively few but interrupt the lives of huge numbers of people. And it’s a similar picture for conflict.

Disaster

Deaths per year

People affected per year

Disease

7,400,000 for top 4 diseases

 

Famine/drought

475,000

4,000,000

Conflict

200,000

16,000,000 refugees 25,000,000 displaced

Natural disasters

30,000

174,000,000

Technological disasters

9,000

-
Sources: World Health Report 2002 (U.N. World Health Organisation - WHO), World Disasters Report 2004 (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies - IFRC)

What are the biggest killer diseases?

Humanitarians tend to focus on communicable diseases which particularly afflict people in poor countries.

Health statisticians find it hard to classify the cause of death from diseases, since there are complex inter-linkages between diseases and other health problems. For example, one impact of AIDS is to make the sufferer far more susceptible to other diseases and to respiratory infections.

Likewise, hunger reduces the body’s ability to fight off disease. The net result is that it is almost certain that the estimates of death by disease in the table below are too low.

To provide a yardstick, the table includes some of the other big global killers. Note the high toll from traffic accidents, which has led some road safety campaigners to say this is the world’s fifth worst communicable disease.

Total infectious and parasitic disease

18.4 million

HIV/AIDS

2.8 million

Diarrhoea

1.8 million

Tuberculosis

1.6 million

Malaria

1.2 million

Measles

0.8 million

 

 

Other killers

 

Traffic accidents

1.2 million

Suicide

0.9 million

Cirrhosis of the liver

0.8 million

Source: The World Health Report 2003 (WHO)

What are the main types of natural disaster? Leaving aside the dispute over whether famine and drought should be classified as natural disasters or not, flooding is the most significant form of natural disaster, and by some margin.

Type of hazard

Annual deaths ‘94-03

Population affected annually ’94-03

Floods

9350

140 million

Windstorms

6100

31 million

Earthquakes

7500

3.4 million

Extreme temperatures

1250

630,000

Avalanches/mudslides

950

280,000

Volcanic eruptions

50

98,000

Source: World Disasters Report 2004, IFRC

What the annual averages conceal is the severity of individual natural disasters. This table shows some of the worst disasters ever recorded.

Date

Type

Location

Deaths

1887

Flood

China, Huang He, or Yellow River

1 million

1556

Quake

China, Shaansi

830,000

1737

Quake

India, Calcutta

300,000

1970

Cyclone

East Pakistan (Bangladesh)

300,000

1976

Quake

China, Tangshan

255,000

1138

Quake

Syria, Aleppo

230,000

2004

Tsunami

Indian Ocean

226,000

1920

Quake

China, Gansu

200,000

c893

Quake

Iran, Ardabil

150,000

1923

Quake

Japan, Kanto

143,000

1991

Cyclone

Bangladesh

138,000

1948

Quake

Turkmenistan

110,000

1908

Quake/Floods

Italy, Messina

est.70,000-100,000

1815

Eruption

Indonesia, Tambora volcano

92,000

1902

Eruption

Martinique, Mt. Pelee

35-40,000

1883

Eruption/Tsunami

Indonesia, Krakatoa

36,000

2003

Quake

Iran, Bam

31,000

Source: Reuters


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