admin January 22nd, 2012
Welcome to 2012. However, this year is unlikely to be better than 2011.
The thing about major disasters is that whilst we don’t know exactly where the next one is going to hit, we can be certain that there will be a next one – and even take some well-informed guesses about where it might hit.
admin March 3rd, 2010
The first nine weeks of 2010 would appear to have brought an intensive run of earthquakes around the world – from Haiti in January to Chile in March, but with other significant quakes so far this year in the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, the China/Russia/North Korea border and Afghanistan/NW Pakistan. All of these measured more than 5 on the Richter Scale.
But there are smaller quakes all over the globe, all the time. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has a real-time map here showing the latest earthquakes in the world over the past seven days. The current total, at the time of writing, is 366. For the past seven days.
admin December 30th, 2009
The number of natural disasters in 2009 was above the long-term average, with 850 being recorded by insurance giant Munich Re. This compares with an average over the past ten years of 770 natural disasters a year. But the death toll from these disasters in 2009 was relatively low.
Munich Re, though, is as interested in the economic losses caused as the total number of disasters, and this number was down – economic losses in the year came to $50bn and insured losses of $22bn compared with economic losses of $200bn and insured losses of $50bn in 2008.
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admin October 14th, 2009
The sheer scale of the devastation caused by the cyclones that hit the Philippines continues to shock and amaze. The cyclones left 648 dead, with many still missing, and affected more than six million people, some 300,000 of whom are still housed in makeshift evacuation centres.
Now the UN is to revise its appeal made on 7th October. Initially it called for $74m, but now it says that this “was clearly not enough” and the UN is stressing that this number would be revised upwards when more detailed reports come in from the field.