Frequency of disasters

There appears to be an increase in the frequency with which disasters are occurring. According to statistics from the International Centre of Interdisciplinary and Advanced Research (ICIAR), disasters were about 100 per decade in 1900-1940, which rose to 650 per decade in the 1960s, 2000 per decade in the 1980s, and it reached 2800 per decade in the 1990s. Further to this the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) stated that by 2010, natural disasters alone have caused the death of more than 780,000 people over the past ten years and destroyed a minimum of US $ 960 billion worth of property and infrastructure (Amaratunga et al 2011)

They further discuss that it is hard to establish whether this growing number of crisis is due to an increase in events or an increase in vulnerability. Vulnerability could be increasing due to a rise in the global population, effects of climate change, the regions economic status, urbanisation, war, poverty or other underlying development issues (Blaikie, Cannon & Davies 2004). ICIAR believe that urban regions have complex infrastructures that support human activities, deliver services and facilitate economic growth which the population are increasingly dependent on and that dependence increases vulnerability.