Disasters last year displaced three times more people than violent conflicts, showing the urgent need to improve resilience for vulnerable people when fighting climate change, according to a study issued yesterday.
The Norwegian Refugee Council, an independent group that focuses on emergency aid, released the findings ahead of a UN summit on Tuesday aimed at building momentum for a global agreement on climate change.
The report said that 22 million people were displaced last year due to disasters brought on by natural hazards, nearly three times the number who were forced from their homes due to violence.
The problem has been worsening, with roughly twice as many people displaced around the world due to disasters now than in the 1970s, even as better forecasting and relief operations have reduced the number of deaths.
“It’s a wake-up call, I think, to world leaders coming here — as bad as it is today, it would be dramatically worse unless much more is invested in resilience,” Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary-General Jan Egeland said. “We have to make people in the Philippines or Chad or in Haiti as resilient as we are in Norway or in many parts of the United States.”
Egeland is a former UN emergency relief coordinator who played a high-profile role drumming up international support after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
He cited the experience as a model, saying that the more than US$13 billion that poured in after the tsunami went not only for reconstruction, but also built up resilience for future disasters.
Such an effort needs to happen on a global scale as “we need to get people out of this vicious cycle of being vulnerable and therefore being hit very hard again,” he said.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called Tuesday’s summit to mobilize world leaders before next year’s conference in Paris that is meant to draft a new global agreement on climate change.
The Norwegian study pointed to findings of a UN-led scientific panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has said that human activity is contributing to the greater frequency and intensity of disasters around the planet.
However, the report said that a sharp rise in urbanization and bad planning were also factors in explaining the steep rise in disaster displacement.
“We are not saying here that it’s climate change that has explained the increase. It’s just as much, or more, population growth and urbanization, bad planning and more exposure to the elements,” Egeland said.
More than 80 percent of the people displaced by natural disasters last year were in Asia, the report found. The Philippines suffered the two most disruptive disasters last year, with Typhoon Haiyan — also known as Yolanda — and Typhoon Trami together displacing 5.8 million people.
Relative to population size, eight of the 20 most disruptive natural disasters were in sub-Saharan Africa. The study warned of growing risks to Africa as the continent experiences higher population growth than other regions.
Wealthy nations were not immune, with a typhoon in Japan’s Chubu region, tornadoes in the US and floods in the Canadian province of Alberta together displacing nearly 600,000 people.
The study also warned of growing risks of natural disasters hitting nations that are also in conflict. It pointed to the 2010 floods that swamped Pakistan as an example of a disaster hitting a fragile state.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of