Disaster by the numbers
Reported natural disasters are up dramatically since 1950, with more lives damaged by homelessness and injury, even as modern medical care and improved disaster response have reduced the number of lives lost, an authority on global disaster data said Monday. The result of these trends is that the burden of care on survivors is increasing, according to Debarati Guha Sapir, director of the Brussels-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster (CRED), which collects and maintains two major global disaster databases. Sapir, who spoke at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), said that some of the dramatic increase in natural disasters observed since 1950 — up to 400 in 2011 from 50 in 1950 — is due to improved communications and reporting in remote places that used to be invisible to the international community. Still, Sapir said, a comparison of geophysical disasters such as earthquakes — which also should have...