Declining Fatalities of Natural Disasters

This should be another good news; despite the many accounts of natural disasters, the overall impact has been diminishing.

Writes the Economist, (bold emphasis mine)

THE world has succeeded in making natural disasters less deadly. Annual death tolls are heavily influenced by outliers, such as Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 (which killed more than 200,000) or the Bangladeshi cyclones in 1970 (300,000). But, adjusted for the Earth’s growing population, the trend in death rates is clearly downward. Economic costs, though, are rising as people and industrial activity cluster in disaster-prone areas such as river deltas and earthquake fault lines. The world’s industrial supply chains were only just recovering from Japan’s earthquake and tsunami in March when a natural disaster severed them again in October. The deluge in Thailand cost $40 billion, the most expensive disaster in the country’s history. J.P. Morgan estimates that it set back global industrial production by 2.5%. Five of the ten costliest, in terms of money rather than lives, were in the past four years. Munich Re, a reinsurer, reckons their economic costs were $378 billion last year, breaking the previous record of $262 billion in 2005 (in constant 2011 dollars). Besides the Japanese and Thai calamities, New Zealand suffered an earthquake, Australia and China floods, and America a cocktail of hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and floods. Barack Obama issued a record 99 “major disaster declarations” in 2011.

Yet the Economist has been reticent about the cause of the accounts of diminishing death toll of natural disasters: Rising global wealth.

Google Public Data

As Professor Christopher Westley writes,

the best protection against natural disasters is not an expansion of the public sector on an international basis, but wealth creation. It is no mistake that natural disasters, which are quite equitable in distribution between rich and poor countries, are more devastating to the poor than the rich. The establishment of a thriving private sector in Sri Lanka, India, and Indonesia is crucial for a quality of life to develop there that can withstand earthquakes and their aftermath as well as does the California coast.

Higher quality or standards of living allows people to take on more protection against prospective calamities.