Director's Annual Message: Focus on Environmental Sustainability and Disasters

In just a bit more than five years, the world has experienced an unprecedented string of “megadisasters.” These events were the result not only of the awesome power of earthquakes and cyclones but were also due to the high exposure and extreme vulnerability of populations around the world to a range of hazards. At the end of 2004, the South Asian tsunami shocked the world with its sudden devastation of many densely settled and poorly protected coastal areas. In 2005 and 2008, we witnessed the suffering of hundreds of thousands affected by major earthquakes in Pakistan and China, compounded by poorly constructed schools, dams, and other structures. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 gave us an object lesson about the potential for disaster even in a highly developed country, if governments and citizens fail to prepare for hazards and fail to respond effectively to them. Then Cyclone Nargis in 2008 provided an even more devastating example of the vulnerability of disenfranchised populations worsened by a rogue government. And now we have begun the year 2010 with damaging earthquakes in both Haiti and Chile—the first inflicting much more death and destruction than it should have and leaving a massive and continuing humanitarian crisis in its wake.

These disasters underscore the important roles population location and physical and social vulnerability play in amplifying the risks of natural hazards around the world. We know that population has been growing much faster in coastal areas than elsewhere, often accompanied by accelerated stress on coastal ecosystems and marine resources. Rapid urbanization is occurring in many areas prone to earthquakes, landslides, and/or floods with little or no attention to building codes, protective works, land degradation, or land use restrictions. Poverty continues to force millions to live in substandard housing in environmentally marginal areas with few resources to draw upon when drought, floods, and other hazards strike. Full story