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Natural Disasters: In Times Like These
Nepal is one of the last Asian countries left on Level 1, and in 2015 it was hit
by an earthquake. The death rate is always higher when a disaster hits a
country on Level 1, because of poorly constructed buildings, poor
infrastructure, and poor medical facilities. Nine thousand people died.
FACT QUESTION 7
How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the last
hundred years?
A: More than doubled
B: Remained about the same
C: Decreased to less than half
This number includes all fatalities from floods, earthquakes, storms,
droughts, wildfires, and extreme temperatures, and also deaths during the
mass displacement of people and pandemics after such events. Just 10 percent
of people picked the right answer, and even in the countries that did best on
this question—Finland and Norway—it was only 16 percent. (As always, the
full country breakdown is in the appendix.) The chimpanzees, who don’t
watch the news, got 33 percent as always! In fact, the number of deaths from
acts of nature has dropped far below half. It is now just 25 percent of what it
was 100 years ago. The human population increased by 5 billion people over
the same period, so the drop in deaths per capita is even more amazing. It has
fallen to just 6 percent of what it was 100 years ago.
The reason natural disasters kill so many fewer people today is not that
nature has changed. It is that the majority of people no longer live on Level 1.
Disasters hit countries on all income levels, but the harm done is very
different. With more money comes better preparedness. The graph below
shows the average number of deaths from natural disasters per million people
over the last 25 years, on each income level.
Thanks to better education, new affordable solutions, and global
collaborations, the decrease in death rates is impressive even among those
who are stuck on Level 1—as shown in the image on the next page. (We look
at averages of 25-year periods because natural disasters don’t occur at an even
rate each year. Even so, just one event, the heat wave in Europe in 2003, was
largely responsible for the fourfold increase in the death rate on Level 4.)
Back in 1942, Bangladesh was on Level 1 and almost all its citizens were
illiterate farmers. Over a two-year period it suffered terrible floods, droughts,
and cyclones. No international organization came to the rescue and 2 million
people died. Today, Bangladesh is on Level 2. Today, almost all Bangladeshi
children finish school, where they learn that three red-and-black flags means
everyone must run to the evacuation centers. Today, the government has
installed across the country’s huge river delta a digital surveillance system
connected to a freely available flood-monitoring website. Just 15 years ago,
no country in the world had such an advanced system. When another cyclone
hit in 2015, the plan worked and the World Food Programme flew in 113 tons
of high-energy biscuits to the 30,000 evacuated families.
In the same year, vivid images spread awareness across the world of the
horrific earthquake in Nepal, and rescue teams and helicopters were quickly
deployed. Tragically, thousands were already dead, but the humanitarian
resources that rushed to this inaccessible country on Level 1 did manage to
prevent the death toll from rising even further.
The UN’s ReliefWeb has become a global coordinator for disaster help—
something earlier generations of disaster victims could only dream of. And it
is paid for by taxpayers on Level 4. We should be very proud of it. We
humans have finally figured out how to protect ourselves against nature. The
huge reduction in deaths from natural disasters is yet another trend to add to
the pile of mankind’s ignored, unknown success stories.
Unfortunately, the people on Level 4 paying for ReliefWeb are the same
people we asked about the trend in natural disasters. Ninety-one percent of
them are unaware of the success they are paying for because their journalists
continue to report every disaster as if it were the worst. The long, elegantly
dropping trend line, a bit of fact-based hope, they think is not newsworthy.
Next time the news shows you horrific images of victims trapped under
collapsed buildings, will you be able to remember the positive long-term
trend? When the journalist turns to the camera and says, “The world just
became a bit more dangerous,” will you be able to disagree? To look at the
local rescue crew in their colorful helmets and think, “Most of their parents
couldn’t read. But these guys are following internationally used first-aid
guidelines. The world is getting better.”
When the journalist says with a sad face, “in times like these,” will you
smile and think that she is referring to the first time in history when disaster
victims get immediate global attention and foreigners send their best
helicopters? Will you feel fact-based hope that humanity will be able to
prevent even more horrific deaths in the future?
I don’t think so. Not if you function like me. Because when that camera
pans to bodies of dead children being pulled out of the debris, my intellectual
capacity is blocked by fear and sorrow. At that moment, no line chart in the
world can influence my feelings, no facts can comfort me. Claiming in that
moment that things are getting better would be to trivialize the immense
suffering of those victims and their families. It would be absolutely unethical.
In these situations we must forget the big picture and do everything we can to
help.
The big facts and the big picture must wait until the danger is over. But
then we must dare to establish a fact-based worldview again. We must cool
our brains and compare the numbers to make sure our resources are used
effectively to stop future suffering. We can’t let fear guide these priorities.
Because the risks we fear the most are now often—thanks to our successful
international collaboration—the risks that actually cause us the least harm.
For ten days or so in 2015 the world was watching the images from Nepal,
where 9,000 people had died. During the same ten days, diarrhea from
contaminated drinking water also killed 9,000 children across the world.
There were no camera teams around as these children fainted in the arms of
their crying parents. No cool helicopters swooped in. Helicopters, anyway,
don’t work against this child killer (one of the world’s worst). All that’s
needed to stop a child from accidentally drinking her neighbor’s still-
lukewarm poo is a few plastic pipes, a water pump, some soap, and a basic
sewage system. Much cheaper than a helicopter.
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