Overview
The Europe and Central Asia region experiences a variety of natural hazards, including floods, earthquakes, droughts, landslides, and wildfires. The frequency and impact of such events can be considerable.
Even if catastrophic events are not as frequent as in other regions, the region has experienced close to 500 significant floods and earthquakes in the last three decades alone – causing a total of 50,000 fatalities, affecting nearly 25 million people, and resulting in over US$80 billion in damage. Over time, close to 30 percent of the capitals of countries in the region have been at one time or another devastated by earthquakes and floods.
The impacts of such disasters are pervasive. Such shocks kill, wound and displace people, destroy property, incapacitate industries, disrupt day-to-day life, and often affect the economic development of countries for years after the event. In the future, the impacts of natural hazards will most likely increase due to changes in climate, demographic growth, and (unplanned) urbanization. These factors increase exposure and vulnerability, and overtime accentuate conditions conducive to natural disasters.
Governments have an opportunity to act now to dramatically reduce the impact of such events. Recognizing, assessing, and understanding risks from natural hazards and climate change are the first steps toward reducing their adverse effects.
Through its Innovation Lab, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) facilitated the development of national probabilistic risk profiles for selected countries across the Europe and Central Asia region. This was a first step toward initiating dialogues with ministries of finance on prioritizing investments in resilience, with a view to building a less risky future for future generations.
These quantitative risk profiles are based on existing global risk models and datasets. From this analysis, national decision-makers and other stakeholders can obtain an overview of the risk faced by each country, how the risk varies across a country’s provinces, and how countries rank with regard to risk in the Europe and Central Asia region.
Each country risk profile contains information on flood and earthquake risk at a national and provincial level – similar to the ThinkHazard! Online Tool. For example, a ranking of countries by annual average GDP affected by floods and earthquakes shows that the country with the highest annual average affected GDP is the Russian Federation ($20 billion), followed by Poland ($7 billion) and Turkey ($5 billion). For earthquakes, the most impacted country is Turkey ($10 billion), followed by Romania ($5 billion) and Greece ($3 billion).
This report provides estimates for more intense, but less frequent, events such as 100-year floods or 250-year earthquakes, and also demonstrates at a regional level why floods pose the highest risk for the Baltic States, the Central European States, and the Russian Federation, while the Caucasus States, South East European states and Central Asia are more affected by earthquakes.
Download the full report
Country Risk Profiles (PDF)
In 2013, an estimated one million Filipinos were plunged into poverty after Typhoon Haiyan sapped $12.9 billion from the national economy and destroyed over a million homes.
No sooner had the 2010 Cyclone Aila devastated coastal areas of Bangladesh than unemployment and poverty levels surged 49 percent and 22 percent, respectively.
Economic strains facing Guatemala after Hurricane Stan in 2005 forced 7.3 percent of affected families to send children to work instead of school.
Whenever disaster strikes, it leaves more than just a trail of devastation—it also leaves communities further in the grip of poverty.
And yet, when we hear of natural disasters today, their financial cost—that is, the damage inflicted on buildings, infrastructure, and agricultural production—is what catches the headlines. New research, however, suggests that reducing natural disasters to their monetary impact does not paint the whole picture. In fact, it distorts it.
That’s because a simple price tag represents only the losses suffered by people wealthy enough to have something to lose in the first place. It fails to account for the crushing impact of disasters on the world’s poor, who suffer much more in relative terms than wealthier people.
Through this lens, a new report released by the World Bank and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), warns that natural disasters are a greater impediment to ending global poverty than previously understood. Launched this week at COP22, the report, Unbreakable: Building the Resilience of the Poor in the Face of Natural Disasters underscores the urgency for climate-smart policies that better protect the world’s most vulnerable.
“Severe climate shocks threaten to roll back decades of progress against poverty,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim. “Storms, floods, and droughts have dire human and economic consequences, with poor people often paying the heaviest price. Building resilience to disasters not only makes economic sense, it is a moral imperative.”
Compared to their wealthier counterparts, poor people are more likely to live in fragile housing in disaster-prone areas, and work jobs in sectors dangerously susceptible to extreme weather events, like farming and agriculture. They also receive much
less government and community support for recovery. The result: the impact of a storm, flood, drought or earthquake is more than twice as significant for poor people than anyone else.
For example, when unprecedented floods affected Mumbai in 2005, poor people lost 60 percent more than their richer neighbors—and when poor people lose the little they have, there are immediate and sometimes irreversible consequences for their health. In Ecuador, poor children exposed in utero to El Niño flooding in 1997-1998 were found to have relatively lower birthweights, shorter statures, and impaired cognitive abilities.
Proposing a new measure for assessing disaster-related damages—one that factors in the unequal burden on the poor—Unbreakable shows that natural disasters currently cost the global economy $520 billion (60 percent more than is usually reported) and force some 26 million people into poverty every year.
But there is hope. Governments can prevent millions of people from falling into extreme poverty by enacting measures that better protect the poor from natural disasters.
The report proposes a “resilience policy” package that would help poor people cope with the consequences of adverse weather and other extreme natural events. This includes early warning systems, improved access to personal banking, insurance policies, and social protection systems (like cash transfers and public works programs) that could help people better respond to and recover from shocks. Unbreakable also calls on governments to make critical investments in infrastructure, dikes, and other means of controlling water levels, and develop appropriate land-use policies and building regulations. These efforts must be specifically targeted to protect the poorest and most vulnerable citizens, not just those with higher-value assets.
The report assesses the expected benefits from these policies in 117 countries. If Angola, for example, were to introduce scalable safety nets to cover its poorest citizens, the government would see gains equaling $160 million a year. Globally, these measures combined would help countries and communities save $100 billion a year and reduce the overall impact of disasters on well-being by 20 percent.
“Countries are enduring a growing number of unexpected shocks as a result of climate change,” said Stephane Hallegatte, a GFDRR lead economist and lead author of the report. “Poor people need social and financial protection from disasters that cannot be avoided. With risk policies in place that we know to be effective, we have the opportunity to prevent millions of people from falling into poverty.”
Efforts to build poor people’s resilience are already gaining ground, the report shows. Only last month, thanks to an innovative insurance program, Haiti, Barbados, Saint Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines received a payout of $29 million in support of recovery efforts after suffering the effects of Hurricane Matthew.
Unbreakable is a roadmap to help countries better adapt to climate change, and boost the resilience and prosperity of their most vulnerable citizens. By equipping the most vulnerable with the means to cope, rebuild and rebound we can increase the chance for millions to stay out of extreme poverty.