A United Nations report said emerging economies in Asia, including the Philippines, are suffering a slowdown in gross domestic product GDP) growth and huge economic losses due to harsh calamities like tsunami, earthquake and flash floods.
The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), thus, urged that new investments must incorporate disaster-risk reduction and mitigation measures in their undertakings or exposure to risk will continue to rise.
The UN report titled “Toward a Post-2015 Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction” said that between 2002 and 2011, a total of 4,130 disasters were recorded; they claimed the lives of 1,117,527. The losses to infrastructure and property for the same period reached $1, 195 billion.
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In 2011, there were 302 devastating disasters that claimed the lives of 29,782 people, affected 206 million people and caused damages worth $366 billion. The Philippines, along with Thailand and Japan suffered harsh disasters last year from flash floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons.
The UN report also showed that the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011 shrunk the country’s GDP by 1 percent. In the Asia-Pacific region, it would mean a 0.1-percent to 0.21-percent impact on growth in China, Malaysia, India, Singapore and the Philippines, while suffering a 0.2 percent to 0.5 percent impact on their export growth due to disruption in inputs from Japan.
The flooding in Thailand, for instance, cost them $40 billion and led to an estimated 2.5-percent drop in global industrial production.
The UN report also cited a new global ranking by Maplecroft, which calculated the vulnerability of 170 countries to the impacts of climate change over the next 30 years.
These countries include “some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies, as facing the greatest risks to their populations, ecosystems and business environments. In this ranking, 16 countries are rated with ‘extreme risk’ to future climate effects largely due to significant forecast growth.”
“There is an increasing amount of foreign direct investment and national private investment in infrastructure and manufacturing, agriculture, tourism and services in many developing and middle-income countries. Risk is accumulating rapidly as economies grow. Thus, new investments need to incorporate disaster-risk reduction and mitigation measures otherwise exposure to risk will continue to rise,” the UN report said.
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