Disaster displacement on the rise

Environmental News Network: In the last seven years, an estimated one person every second has been forced to flee their home by a natural disaster, with 19.3 million people forced to flee their homes in 2014 alone, according to a new report.

The research suggests disaster displacement is on the rise, and as policy leaders worldw
ide advance towards the adoption of a post-2015 global agenda, the time has never been better to address it.

In the report, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) released today its global report, The Global Estimates: People displaced by disasters. The report reveals how, in 2014, 17.5 million people were forced to flee their homes by disasters brought on by weather-related hazards such as floods and storms, and 1.7 million by geophysical hazards such as earthquakes.

“The millions of lives devastated by disasters is more often a consequence of bad man-made structures and policies, than the forces of mother nature,” said Jan Egeland, Secretary General of NRC. “A flood is not in itself a disaster, the catastrophic consequences happen when people are neither prepared nor protected when it hits.”...

Stillaguamish River (South Fork) flood at Granite Falls in 2006, 9 feet above flood stage. Shot by Walter Siegmund, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license