Asia-Pacific region hard hit by natural disasters, UN says
Asia-Pacific region hard hit by natural disasters, UN says
Jun Kwanwoo, Agence France-Presse/Seoul
The Asia-Pacific region has accounted for four out of every five global victims of natural disasters for the past century and remains highly vulnerable, a UN report said on Tuesday.
The release of the report at a conference of regional environment ministers came hours after a major earthquake rocked Indonesia, leaving hundreds and possibly thousands dead.
The region is still struggling to recover from the Indian Ocean tsunami of Dec. 26 which the report said cost 295,000 lives.
"The number of deaths caused (by) natural disasters in the region accounted for about 85 percent of that of the world during the last century," said the report by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).
Since 1900 floods, cyclones, earthquakes, droughts, storms, tsunamis and haze were the most common natural disasters experienced in the Asia-Pacific, it said.
Australia, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines and Vietnam were most frequently hit by natural disasters.
From 1990-2003, natural disasters cost the Asia-Pacific region some US$380 billion in economic losses, mostly from cyclones, floods and earthquakes, ESCAP said in a separate survey.
During the same period an estimated 6.8 million people died in the region as a result of such disasters, including 295,000 killed in the Indian Ocean tsunami late last year.
"These losses have much more severe socio-economic impacts on those developing and least-developed countries," said Kim Hak-Su, UN under secretary general and executive secretary of ESCAP.
The region, which accounts for 40 percent of the world's territory but is home to 61 percent of its population, has struggled to grow in the face of rampant poverty.
Almost two-thirds of the world's poor, who live on less than $1 a day, live in Asia and the Pacific, UN statistics show.
In an effort to drag the region out of poverty, many governments have sought to boost industrial production. During the 1995-2002 period, industrial output in the region grew almost 40 percent, almost double the global average increase of 23 percent.
But Asia-Pacific ministers attending the two-day conference were warned that such high growth is no longer sustainable unless more attention is paid to the environment.
The UN conference -- attended by 350 delegates, including 42 ministers or deputy ministers -- adopted a "Seoul Initiative for Green Growth" at the close of the meeting.
The initiative called for Asia-Pacific countries to establish a network to coordinate, implement and review action plans to achieve sustainable growth in the region.