Natural Disasters and Their Impacts

Natural Disasters and Their Impacts

The risk from natural is increasing all the time, more hurricanes, and

floods are predicted to result from global climate change. At the

moment, on average, each year natural disasters leave around 4 million

people homeless and kill 128,000 people world wide, this is not even

taking into consideration the damage that they perform in the process,

and the cost that this causes the worlds economy. Each year the

developing countries accept $35 billion dollars in damages caused by

natural disasters from the rest of the world. There is little doubt

that natural disasters have a significant impact on the world, whether

developing or already developed. The extent to of this effect will

always depend on several things, where about in the world that the

hazard occurs is the main factor i.e. a developed or developing

country. This can determine how prepared the area that it occurs is,

and so how bad the impact on the country is, because obviously almost

always the more prepared a country is for an event, then the less

drastic it will be when it finally hit, as they can take adequate

precautions to try and prevent it causing complete devastation. Not

only will this differ in the two countries, but also the knowledge of

the public will change, again disadvantaging the less developed

countries.

So in order to try and answer the question posed I will need to look

at a variety of different hazards that affect us, I will include

earthquakes, volcanoes and tropical cyclones. For each of these

hazards I will look at the preparation that each country undertook,

and their general management of the hazard for an ex...

... middle of paper ...

...eloped country.

The technology and communications between people in MEDC's far

outstrips that of other poorer countries, and so the people are

infinitely more prepared for crisis like these, and will have warning,

often, far before it actually occurs.

All these things add to the reasons why the impact of disasters vary

between the two examples of countries, and why some devastate some

countries and leave other virtually untouched, even if they have the

same characteristics. It is why the death toll in one country can be

extortionate for a minor event, while at the other side of the world

there can be few casualties for something much more drastic. However

it is not the final deciding point and there are other things to

consider which can important in deciding how serious it may get, but

it is definitely an issue.