-Caveat Lector-
http://news.excite.com/news/r/991221/13/life-disasters
World suffers new disaster record in 1999-insurer
Reuters News Service
Updated 1:04 PM ET December 21, 1999
By David Crossland
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Nature plagued the world with a record number of
disasters in 1999 but the death toll fell far short of the worst single
catastrophe of the last 1,000 years, a Chinese flood that killed 900,000 in
1887.
Munich Re, one of the world's largest reinsurers, said that about 70,000
people were killed in well over 700 disasters this year, including up to
30,000 who died in floods and mudslides in Venezuela this week.
Climatic changes such as global warming were partly to blame, but it was
impossible to say to what extent, Munich Re said.
"We have a feeling that climate changes will play an increasing role in the
future," said Gerhard Berz, head of a Munich Re research team that has been
collecting worldwide data on disasters for the last 25 years.
Economic losses resulting from catastrophes surged to $535 billion per
decade in the 1990s from $38 billion in the 1950s in price-adjusted terms,
Munich Re said.
Insurance losses have risen at almost twice that rate as worldwide insurance
cover has increased, Munich Re said.
Alongside environment changes, urban growth and growing population density
are causing the increase in catastrophe losses. A violent storm in a desert
is a natural spectacle but it becomes a disaster if it strikes a town.
MAN A BIGGER KILLER THAN NATURE
More than 15 million people died in over 100,000 natural catastrophes over
the last thousand years, with some 3.5 million deaths this century alone,
Munich Re said.
The total amounts to less than half the fatalities of World War II but
excludes the unquantifiable millions who died of drought and famine.
Munich Re has written a review of the millennium based on what it says is a
unique archive of data used by scientists, engineers and authorities all
over the world.
But contrary to the impression given by the record number of disasters and
the thousands of deaths this year, death tolls seem to be declining, Munich
Re said. Improved early warning systems and protection systems are helping.
Cyclones claimed well over one million lives in India and Bangladesh in the
18th and 19th centuries, and hundreds of thousands drowned in freak North
Sea storms in the late Middle Ages.
This century's worst disaster was an earthquake in July 1976 that killed
290,000 people in the Tangshan region of north-east China. Economic losses
at $5.6 billion were uninsured.
Earthquakes are the biggest killers, accounting for 47 percent of deaths.
Windstorms claim 45 percent, followed by floods with seven percent.
Archive: Wed Dec 22 Tue 21 Mon 20 Sun 19 Sat 18 Fri 17 Thu 16
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