The three fold increase in the number of disasters over the past ten years has set alarm bells ringing.

They used to be called "Acts of God", now more and more people are beginning to wonder whether the Almighty is really the culprit.

Whether human economic activity is to blame is still a matter of uncertainty. What is in no doubt is that bad decisions have amplified human suffering and the economic cost of so-called 'natural' disasters.

In this week's Earth Report we see how poor communities are the first to suffer from decisions made by the rich and powerful.

Brewing up a storm: stripping away nature's defenses

When Hurricane Mitch hit the Caribbean in October 1998 no one could have believed the damage that would be left in the wake of one tropical storm. For the Central American state of Honduras, Mitch was nothing short of a human catastrophe.

One year later a 'super' cyclone hit the Indian state of Orissa, leaving 10,000 dead, whole villages washed away and local agriculture destroyed.

Were these poor communities just victims of 'natural' events? Alternatively, was the human suffering from these climate-related disasters exacerbated by man's meddling with already fragile environments?

When Orissa's mangroves were cleared to make way for shrimp farms, the coast lost its natural shield leaving an unfettered path inland for the cyclones that regularly batter this shoreline. In Honduras, years of extensive logging had left mountain soil unprotected and eroded - which the ensuing deluge swept down hillsides, burying whole villages in rivers of mud.

Smoke screen: big business and the environment

In 1997, two million hectares of rainforest burned out of control in Indonesian Borneo. The resulting severe air pollution that blanketed much of South East Asia led to serious respiratory ailments. But the smoke and pollution did not obscure the real cause of this disaster: big plantation companies demonstrating short termism on a scale rarely seen before. Incredibly, the same companies continued their widespread slash and burn for the next two years...

Disappearing seas: the legacy of a macro-economy

Next, Earth Report travels to the Aral Sea, what's left of it.

Once the world's fourth-largest inland water body, the Aral Sea has shrunk to half its size - leaving once bustling fishing ports stranded more than 80 kilometres from today's coastline.

During the 1960s Moscow diverted vast quantities of water from the rivers that fed the Aral into huge cotton fields. Now the Aral Sea is little more than a dustbowl littered with the skeletons of ships.

On shaky ground: cut-price construction - the great leveller

At two minutes past three on the seventeenth of August 1999, the North Anatolian Fault slipped three metres towards Greece in the west, bringing most of Turkey with it. In the minutes that followed building after building crumbled into piles of rubble, leaving 17,000 dead.

In the wake of the disaster, Turkey's Prime Minister was forced to acknowledge that cut-price construction - and the government's failure to enforce safe building standards - was responsible for the death toll.

Now, alarm bells are ringing for urban planners around the world. Forty of the world's fifty fastest growing cities are in earthquake zones - and many have substantial poor populations living in shanty towns or low-cost housing.

War: the cost of conflict

The devastating 1998 famine in Southern Sudan was blamed on the civil war. Abusive tactics by government and rebel forces were held responsible for driving people off their land - land which could have sustained them.

At the height of the famine, while Aid agencies were air-lifting US $1 million a day to hungry Sudanese, their government was spending the same amount making war. Here corruption and conflict were at the root of this man-made famine.

Rising waters: civil engineering's hall of shame

Although ninety-six per cent of disaster deaths occur in developing countries, unnatural disasters are not the sole preserve of the poor.

In 1997 the River Oder in Germany burst its banks as flood water from Poland surged through the river system swamping fertile farmland and 20,000 homes. The cause? Upstream, wetlands and marshes - nature's safety-valve when rivers flood - had long since disappeared under concrete.

Just five years earlier, America's mid-west lay submerged under the flood waters of the Mississippi - America's most heavily engineered natural feature. With nearly 80% of the riverine wetlands drained and channel leveed the flood waters of 1993 had no natural escape. Flood walls were breached and whole towns swamped.

However, unnatural disasters aren't just the result of localised bad planning. The upward trend in weather-related disasters - from deluge to drought - has occurred in tandem with global warming caused by greenhouse gases.

Climate change: victims of our own development

With greenhouse gas emissions rising, scientists are beginning to agree that extreme weather phenomena are not the 'natural' events of the past, and that the effects of extreme events may well stretch farther than the immediate geographical area they hit.

In London, some of the world's largest insurance companies are swallowing ever-harder as they consider the mounting losses which they attribute specifically to man-made climate change.

Another year of disasters like 1998 could bankrupt the entire global insurance industry, dragging down national economies and maybe even the global economy with it.

Sustainable development?

Over the next 20 years Christian Aid estimates that three-quarters of the world's population - most in poor countries - will suffer floods or droughts.

The world's poor are not holding their breath waiting for guilt money from the big polluters to flood in. They are taking matters into their own hands - insuring themselves against the elements with home-grown survival techniques and simple bio engineering.

However, localised efforts will not solve the global problems facing the world. And if the trends are not reversed now, we may not have another thousand years to correct our mistakes.