Part I
The standard way in which disaster damage is measured involves a separate examination of the number of fatalities, injuries, and people otherwise affected, and the financial damage that natural disasters cause. A new way to aggregate measures of disaster impact aims to overcome many of the difficulties previously iden-tified in the literature, including the difficulty of assessing overall disaster impact, the need to conduct cost-benefit analyses that take different disaster impacts into account, and the problem of assessing damage relative to its value in different countries.
Despite some conceptual differences, the new approach proposed is similar to the World Health Organiza-tion’s calculation of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) lost from the burden of diseases and injuries.3 All measures of disaster impact are converted into “life years” to allow a worldwide comparison of trends in disaster losses. The advantage of this new measurement is that it accounts for the more general impact of disasters on human welfare and enables a comparison of these impacts across the globe.4
Box I.1 An innovative way to measure disaster impact
As the HFA comes to its close, all the indications are that its expected outcome, to achieve “The substantial reduction of disaster losses, in lives and in the social and economic assets of com-munities and countries”, has only been partially achieved.
Disaster mortality remains high: 1.6 million peo-ple have died in internationally reported disas-ters since the start of the IDNDR in 1990, making for an average of around 65,000 deaths per year.
Yet this number is far less than the average of 1.24 million deaths in traffic accidents every year1 or the average of 1 million who die from tubercu-losis every year. From that perspective, disaster mortality could be considered a less critical glob-al problem than disease or accidents.
Economic losses from internationally reported disasters have also grown steadily since 1990, reaching an estimated annual average of US$200 billion (Munich Re., 2013). However, this is only a fraction of global GDP, which was close to US$75 trillion in 2013,2 and fails to ring the same alarm bells as the US$4 trillion in losses to the banking sector during the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 (IMF, 2007-2009).
Part of the reason why disaster losses have not created the same political or economic
imperative to address the risks of disease or financial risks may be the way in which they are measured. In reality, disasters affect households, communities and countries due to the combined impact of mortality, morbidity and damaged or destroyed housing, infrastructure and agricul-ture. Separate measurements of mortality and economic loss fail to capture the full dimensions of disaster.
To address this problem, and for illustrative pur-poses, the concept of human life years can be used to provide a better representation of disas-ter impact, as it provides a metric describing the time required to produce economic development and social progress. The loss of human life years, be it through disasters, disease or accidents, is therefore a way of measuring setbacks to social and economic development (Box I.1).
When disaster losses are expressed using human life years as a common currency (Noy, 2014), their potential scale comes into clearer focus.
Between 1980 and 2012, more than 1.3 billion life years were lost worldwide in internationally reported disasters (ibid.), making for an annual average of 42 million life years. Expressed in this way, disaster loss is roughly equivalent to the 43 million life years lost annually from tuberculosis, about 20 per cent lower than the life years lost
Figure I.1 Loss of life years in China, 1990-2012
from malaria and about half the 90 million years lost from HIV/AIDS.5
Major disasters such as the Christchurch earth-quake or the Bangkok floods in 2011 can cause a significant number of lost life years to accu-mulate in a single country. New Zealand lost a total of almost 200,000 life years in the Febru-ary 2011 earthquake, equivalent to about 17 days per inhabitant. In Thailand, 4.76 million life years were lost in the 2011 Chao Phraya River floods;
this figure translates into about 26 days per per-son (Noy, 2015).
In low and middle-income countries, the losses are generally higher than in high-income coun-tries. In China, 557,438,270 life years were lost between 1990 and 2012, which equals a per capi-ta loss of 162 days (Figure I.1.). In Turkey, tocapi-tal life years lost in the same period amounted to more than 4 million, or 25 days per person (Noy, 2015).
These figures are even higher when the loss of
life years from nationally reported disasters is included. Globally, the additional life years lost due to extensive disasters are estimated to add another 20 per cent to internationally reported disasters, and this increase can be as high as 130 per cent in low-income countries. In Indonesia, for example, when lost life years are calculated using national loss data, the total for the peri-od from 1990 to 2012 amounts to more than 25 million life years lost, or 42 days lost per person.
Small island developing states, such as the South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, experience signif-icantly larger per capita losses, amounting to 4 years per person since 1980 (Noy, 2015).
As an illustration, this data underlines that disas-ter loss is as much a critical global challenge to economic development and social progress as disease is. However, the figures also show that it is a challenge unequally shared. Over 90 per cent of the total life years lost in disasters are spread across low and middle-income countries (Figure I.2).
Notes
1 WHO Factsheet No. 358, March 2013: http://www.who.int/
mediacentre/factsheets/fs358/en/.
2 World Bank data: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.
MKTP.CD/countries/1W?display=graph.
3 http://www.who.int/topics/global_burden_of_disease/en (accessed 3 January 2015).
4 For details on the methodology, please see Noy, 2014.
5 Calculated using data on DALYs from the WHO: http://www.
who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimates/en/
index2.html.
In particular, more life years are lost per capita in low-income countries than in any other income group (Figure I.3).
These findings suggest that while disaster risk is a universal problem that affects all regions and
(Source: Noy, 2014.)
Figure I.2 Share of life years lost across income groups
Figure I.3 Lost life years relative to population, 1990 - 2012
income groups, as a development challenge it continues to be concentrated in low and mid-dle-income countries. As explored in detail in the different chapters of this part of the report, these are the countries that will need to increase capital investment and social expenditure sub-stantially if they are to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and whose capacity to do so will be challenged by increasing disaster risk.