11. Disasters – Tsunamis, War and Climate Change

Key points:

• Many fewer people die in natural disasters now than they used to.?But humanitarian needs have tripled in the last seven years due to the climate crisis and wars.
• The progress we have made in reducing the number of people killed in natural disasters is going to be outweighed by the increased number of not-so-natural disasters, if we do not urgently address the climate crisis and stop burning fossil fuels.?
• There was a huge and sudden drop in deaths caused by conflict when the Cold War stopped in 1990. But since 2012, conflict has increased again, starting with war in Syria, then Yemen, Myanmar and now Ukraine.?

?In 2004, the Disasters Emergency Committee raised ￡400M for communities devastated by the Boxing Day Indian Ocean tsunami. ?I was working 10 Downing Street and had to brief the Prime Minister daily on the British death count. 153 Britons died.?Almost 230,000 people died in total.?

For the last eight years, I have been a Board member of the Disasters Emergency Committee, as the CEO of CARE International UK, one of the DEC’s 15 member agencies.?In 2022, the DEC is on track to raise ￡400M again, for people affected by the war in Ukraine. ?

Has anything improved? ?Yes and no.

Let’s start with the yes. Many fewer people die in natural disasters now than they used to. ?Chart 12 below takes account of global population growth and shows that the number of deaths per 100,000 people caused by ‘natural disasters’ has fallen dramatically over the last century and even since the 1980s.?

How have we made such amazing progress? ?For genuinely natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, and tropical storms it is about prevention. ?This fundamentally means safer buildings and early warnings. ?There was almost no tsunami early warning system in Indian Ocean countries in 2004 when the 9.3 magnitude under sea earthquake erupted. Almost 230,000 people died.?There are much better early warnings now especially for tropical storms, which give authorities time to get people to higher ground or storm shelters.

Improved building standards in higher income countries means earthquakes and tropical storms are much less likely to kill people than in the 1906 San Francisco quake. But poorer people in lower income countries are still likely to live in very vulnerable houses.?CARE’s Shelter team focuses on ensuring that when people rebuild their own homes (as the vast majority do in lower income countries) after earthquakes and tropical storms, they build back safer. ?What I’d really like to do is persuade donor governments, or insurance companies, to fund a programme to make people’s homes safer before they collapse in an earthquake or storm.?Even though it is well known that prevention is much cheaper and better for people than responding to an emergency, donors put much more money into humanitarian response than prevention because that’s when the media arrives.

The impact of some other ‘natural disasters’ is more manmade than natural. ?Drought in particular leads to food shortages. Whether that leads to people starving to death or being fed, is up to us. ?In the 1984 Ethiopia famine that led to Band Aid and Live Aid, it is variously estimated that between 300,000 and 1,200,000 people died and that at least half of those deaths were caused by war and human rights abuses, rather than the drought itself. ?

By comparison, the East Africa Food Crisis in 2017 put 23 million people in urgent need of food.?This time, people and governments in East Africa, supported by the UN, donor governments in richer countries and humanitarian agencies like CARE and other members of the Disasters Emergency Committee, managed to avert disaster by stepping in early.

East Africa faces famine again in 2022. The drought is made worse by the climate crisis caused by fossil fuel emissions in richer countries and the war in Europe.?People in East Africa are not responsible for climate change nor war in Ukraine, but they are the ones at risk of famine again right now. ?Will the world avert a disaster as it did in 2017??I hope so.?But the UK is not leading the way as it did in 2017, because it has slashed its aid budget and no longer has the leadership position to get others to do more.?I hope the efforts of charities like CARE, Save the Children, Oxfam, Christian Aid, Islamic Relief and CAFOD to raise the alarm will be heard.

The climate crisis clearly leads to more droughts, and wildfires. It is also making tropical storms more frequent and more powerful. ?The UN says there were almost twice as many climate related disasters in the last 20 years than in the 20 years before that. ?In 2019, Cyclone Idai hit Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Madagascar. ?It was one of the worst tropical storms to ever hit Africa. It killed at least 1,300 people and hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes. ?Three million people required humanitarian assistance. ?Sadly, the progress we have made in reducing the number of people killed in natural disasters is going to be outweighed by the increased number of not-so-natural disasters, if we do not urgently address the climate crisis and stop burning fossil fuels.?

Overall, humanitarian needs have more than tripled in the last seven years.?And the biggest driver of that increase is 100% manmade – conflict. ?

The UN’s global humanitarian overview for 2022 estimates 274 million people will need humanitarian aid in 2022 in 30 countries.?The vast majority of these emergencies are caused by conflict.?The ten biggest emergencies are in DRC, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, ?South Sudan, Nigeria, Colombia. ?All conflicts. ?And the 2022 UN overview was published before Russia invaded Ukraine.??

There was a huge and sudden drop in deaths caused by conflict when the Cold War stopped in 1990. ?(see Chart 14 below) It was called a cold war in Europe but in fact the “East” and “West” fought many proxy but hot, real wars in the rest of the world. ?Corrupt leaders in low-income countries were loaned money to keep them as allies, and were allowed to keep the money for themselves, leading to the debt crisis in the 1990s which was campaigned against by Jubilee 2000. After 1990 we had 25 years of relative peace, with some notable exceptions, the worst being the Rwanda genocide. ?

But since 2012, conflict has increased again, starting with war in Syria, then Yemen, Myanmar and now Ukraine.?And some conflicts like in South Sudan Somalia, DRC and Afghanistan have been going on for decades.?

In 2019, I visited Yemen a week after a fragile ceasefire began in Hodeida after months of bombing. ?We visited the Red Sea port. Shipping containers filled with concrete, stacked four high and cutting across roads, to mark front lines in the middle of the city, reminded me of how the Berlin Wall sliced streets in half.?Barbed wire and earthworks, dividing the promenade from a probably beautiful beach looked like pictures of world war one trenches. ?Some kind of normal life insisted on pushing back.?Trucks motored down roads with their horns singing.?Seafood restaurants and mango sorbet counters were re-opening. ?Even in war, life tries to continue. ?I was in tears as I heard how our Yemeni staff had themselves been forced out of their own houses once, twice or three times, each time moving with the conflict to keep helping others in even greater need. ?They said it helped them understand even better the people it was their job to help. ?It showed the amazing things that people, and humanitarian aid workers will do to help others.?Aid is keeping millions of people alive in Yemen.

And this is why the UK Government’s decisions to close DFID and slash the aid budget are so bad. ?In 2021 the UK Government cut the humanitarian assistance budget for Yemen by 59% . ?Not because the need had gone down. Because the government broke the law to cut the aid budget and then implemented it without any effort to minimise risk to life. The UK government stopped providing lifesaving food aid to 250,000 people in Yemen. ?

Meanwhile, the only sustainable solution to end suffering in Yemen is to end the war.?But instead of getting British diplomats focused on the peace process, and maybe asking the MOD to stop selling bombs to Saudi Arabia to drop on schools in Yemen, the Prime Minister announced that he was going to make the Foreign Office focus on taking over the Department for International Development.?So senior officials and ministers were focused on that instead of negotiating peace in Yemen or spotting what was happening in Afghanistan. ?

If we want to reduce the number of people in humanitarian need, and start spending that money on better things like preventing disasters and providing long term health and education, then we need diplomats to be focussed on building peace, not managing development programmes. We need different experts to do different things.?

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