They used to call events like these "Acts of God." But more and more people are beginning to wonder whether the Almighty is really to blame.

UNNATURAL DISASTERS

MOZAMBIQUE 2000: "When your family's been buried alive and you're left to dig up your dead, the unspoken question on the lips of those left behind is "why?"

"It's a question that echoes across every continent, a disturbing and deeply relevant question that's nagging at the minds of survivors, scientists and insurance brokers alike.

"The three-fold increase in the number of disasters over the past ten years has set alarm bells ringing. Even allowing for inflation, the cost of these catastrophes has risen nine times over.

"The human costs are rising even faster and it's the world's poor who are bearing the brunt of it. "Natural" disasters are turning into overwhelming human catastrophes."

Dr Jeremy Leggett: "We are seeing dramatic trends in natural disasters. We are seeing worst of the century, worst of the millennium, once every thousand year events now regularly seemingly every other year on virtually every continent on the planet. Bad as the losses have been in recent years, they can get much, much worse and they will do."

Comm: "Honduras Mitch 1998 was the worst year on record. Worldwide, 700 extreme weather events affected 300 million people, creating 25 million refugees - more than the last two world wars put together.

"The damage bill for that one year alone was more than double the total cost of disasters during the 1980s. For the Central American state of Honduras, Mitch was nothing short of an environmental apocalypse.

"At a stroke, the country's plantation economy was laid waste, its infrastructure - roads, bridges, telecommunications wiped out. Totally. The damage: five billion dollars and rising.

"Whole communities were destroyed. At least 11,000 dead; many more missing and three-million homeless in four countries.

"The catastrophe encapsulated the accelerating financial and social costs of natural disasters. "

Malcolm Rogers, Christian Aid: "In Honduras a million people were forced off their land, crime rates soared, domestic violence rose exponentially, infant mortality, unemployment, all of these figures go through the roof and what that creates of course is social and political dislocation and in some cases even civil war."

Comm: "Mitch set in motion one of the biggest international aid efforts ever attempted.

"Experts deemed the hurricane the worst disaster ever to hit the Western Hemisphere. But what started as a Category Five Monster had been downgraded to tropical storm status by the time it hit Honduras. So who vested Mitch with the power to kill on such as scale and wreak such devastation? God?"

ORISSA
India 1999

Comm: "At least 10,000 dead.

"It's October 1999 and a tropical cyclone's just swept through the eastern Indian state of Orissa. Whole villages washed away, rice crops destroyed.

"Ninety-six per cent of disaster deaths occur in developing countries. The .development agency Christian Aid estimates that over the next 20 years, three-quarters of the world's population - most in poor countries - will suffer floods or droughts.

"They say these climate-related catastrophes could cost the world ten-trillion dollars.

"The human suffering wrought by both Mitch and the Orissa cyclone was made many times worse by man's meddling with nature.

"When Orissa's mangroves were cleared to make way for shrimp farms, the fragile coast lost it's natural shield and a man-made disaster ensued. And in Honduras? The extent of the damage inflicted by Hurricane Mitch has been blamed on extensive logging. Loss of tree cover left soils exposed to erosion and led to the mudslides that buried whole villages."

Watson: "There are many reasons we're losing the forests, that we're draining our wetlands. Quite often, people want a short-term economic return - they only see 'til tomorrow morning and unfortunately we don' t have a marketplace that today captures the long-term ecological values of our wetlands and of our forests. It largely boils down to what degree do you want to utilise resources for the short-term gain, versus the long-term."

Damage bill US$1.7-billion

Regional Health Bill US$1.4-billion


Comm: "The rainforest holocaust in Indonesian Borneo was ignited by big plantation companies demonstrating "short-termism" on a scale rarely seen before. In 1997, two-million hectares of what the United Nations calls "the world's biological heritage" blazed out of control, creating in its words "an environmental and humanitarian disaster of exceptional proportions."

"Severe air pollution blanketed much of Southeast Asia leading to serious respiratory ailments. The fires happened again the next year. And then again the next.

TOEPFER: "I believe we are far from a blue-eyed optimistic view. And the one or the other mistake will be repeated again and again. It is really the simple economic consequences of all this that gives us the need for a longer and more detailed planning view. You can go to quite a lot of main dams in the world where you have the short-term advantages paid very very high prices with regard to medium and long-term disadvantages."

CENTRAL ASIA

"Though the rivers rage and over-flow, sea will not be filled."

Comm: "When we interfere with rivers, whether it's big dam projects or changing the courses of the rivers themselves, we invite disaster. This is the Aral Sea, or what's left of it.

"Once the world's fourth-largest inland water body, it's shrunk to less than half it's original size. The Soviet Union bequeathed the Central Asian republics a dustbowl, now littered with the skeletons of ships.

"In the 1960s, Moscow decreed that greater and greater quantities of water from the two rivers which feed the Aral be used to irrigate. huge new cotton fields.

"The port of Muynak, now 80 kilometres from the shore. A ghost-town where winds whip up a noxious mixture .of sand, salt and chemicals which has shrouded the town.

"The once-bustling fishing port has only one factory now: the local fish-canning plant. Its fish come from the Baltic.

"In the 13th century, a revered Muslim acetic Kurkut Ata, warned his people against grandiose schemes designed to satisfy human greed. "Though the rivers rage and over-flow," he wrote, "the sea will not be filled." Eight centuries on, Kurkut Ata's words have come to haunt the inhabitants of this sterile ecological disaster zone.

"The World Bank had nothing to do with the Aral, but it too has funded many grandiose follies of the modern era. But its Chief Scientist insists .it's learning from its mistakes."

Bob Watson: "Some people argue that our policies are way too rigid, but in our opinion those policies are there to protect both society and the environment from long-term damage, which at the end of the day, we believe is essential for the long term sustainability. It largely boils down to what degree do you want to utilise resources for the short term gain versus the long term. The challenge in the bank is to persuade the country directors and the World Bank macro-economists that environment is indeed essential to poverty alleviation."

"Reducing disasters means tackling poverty. It's the poor who get hit hardest when catastrophe strikes and the urban poor are particularly vulnerable as city slums are crammed to bursting.

"Forty of the world's fifty fastest-growing cities are in earthquake zones. Across the world, 600-million people now live in .urban shanties, often on steep hillsides or next to rivers. And their numbers grow .every day: the highest birth rates are often found in the poorest communities."

Bob: "What we now recognise is that many poor people are extremely vulnerable to natural disasters such as the hurricanes that we've seen hit the Caribbean, the floods in the Yangtze, the floods in Bangladesh. But it does absolutely no good to help pull out today's generation from poverty if all we do is denude the earth and leave essential life functions dying for the next generation and the generation after."

TURKEY EARTHQUAKE
Northwestern Turkey 1999

Comm: "17,000 dead. Kemal Ataturk, the man who built modern Turkey, surveys the demolition wrought by the 1999 quake. For all our knowledge and skills, we're rendered impotent .in the face of seismic force.

"At two minutes past three in the morning of the seventeenth of August the North Anatolian Fault slipped three metres towards Greece in the west, bringing most of Turkey with it. Above the epicentre, apartment blocks concertinared into piles of rubble; but the apparent randomness of the destruction, with some buildings surviving unscathed, raised awkward questions."

Prof Turan Durgunglau, Engineer, Bosporos University: "People will start pointing fingers and there will be some kind of witch hunt of sorts for the accountable people, I mean essentially people who have built constructions where five buildings identical, one falls down the other four are left standing, are going to be blamed for some type of corruption."

Comm: "Get-rich-quick property developers were the focus of a rising tide of public anger over shoddy, cut-price construction techniques.

"Turkey's Prime Minister was forced to acknowledge the failure of previous governments - and of his own - to enforce building standards.

"It didn't take long for local analysts to conclude that it wasn't just buildings that had collapsed.

Emre Timurkan, Korfez Bank: "The system has collapsed. This country now understood that the system we have created since so many years, since seventy years, has collapsed. Now, we have to find a new system, a new system, a workable central government, political behaviour, a politcal system, social, cultural, everything has to change.

"There's a rule of thumb about corruption and bad governance. The poorer the people the worse the disaster.

"Wherever you look in the world, corruption and environmental crisis are closely linked."

Toepfer: "There are quite a lot of very bad examples of the inter-relation between corruption and the negative repercussion to the environment. Yes, there is a clear signal that wherever you increase the democratic basis and the credibility of a government you also have a better basis for fighting against all of those behaviours being a negative consequence for the environment."

Comm: "Southern Sudan 1998, The devastating famine in the Sudan in 1998 was blamed on the civil war. Both government and rebel forces are accused .of abusive and predatory tactics which drove the people off their land."

Toepfer: "It is a question of the social justice in a country to avoid problems like famine, to organise this in advance. To be aware of the responsibility for the poor people and it is a shame that lots of examples are available where the expenditure for military reasons is going on while the poorest of the poor are really suffering on a severe famine."

OPERATION LIFELINE, SUDAN

Comm: "2-million dead since 1983. At the height of the famine, the international community was spending one-million dollars a day airlifting food to hungry Sudanese who would otherwise have fed themselves. Their government was meanwhile spending one million dollars a day making war.
.
"The experts have coined a new term for tragedies like these: complex combined emergencies.

"And the number of such catastrophes is doubling every twenty years."

PART TWO


RIVER ODER, GERMANY 1997

Comm: "Beneath the dawn mist, the sun's first rays reveal a vast new lake on the German-Polish border.

"The River Oder, swollen overnight by another surge of floodwater from .Poland, now breaching dykes, inundating fertile farmland and threatening the homes of 20,000 people. Unnatural disasters are not the preserve of the poor.

"This torrent, the result of persistent heavy rain in the river's eastern catchment. There, marshes and wetlands - nature's safety-valve when rivers flood - had long ago disappeared under concrete. It's central Europe's worst disaster in decades.

"The German army, engaged in its largest peacetime operation, was to fight a losing battle, as the river's defences crumbled, the water pouring in even faster than army reinforcements.

MISSISSIPPI

Comm: "Mississippi River 1993. In the American mid-west it started raining in January and it didn't stop for nine months. The Mississippi went wild.

"Already in flood from snowmelt in the Rockies, each new tributary added to the flow.

"The National Guard was called in as flood walls were breached and whole towns swamped.

"The Mississippi River system is one of the most heavily engineered natural features in the Americas. Eighty per cent of the riverine wetlands have been drained since the 1940s and the channel artificially constrained by levees.

"Water always has to go somewhere and grand engineering feats have a habit of backfiring when they' re not carefully thought through. But unnatural disasters aren't just the result of localised bad planning or chopping down trees.

"The upward trend in weather-related disasters - from deluge to drought - has occurred in tandem with global warming caused by Greenhouse Gases.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Bob Watson: "The US and Europe have already put huge amounts of polluting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere - we've basically helped to put the world at a precipice of where the climate changes may affect everyday living standards of all humans.

Mohammed El Ashri, Global Environmental Facility: "Of course we know that climate has changed many times throughout the history of the earth and throughout human history itself but that was due to natural causes. Now there is evidence of human interference and the answer without a doubt by the respective scientists throughout the world is "YES."

"The unfortunate thing is that no one can point at any particular event whether it's a hurricane, whether it's a flood and say this is exactly because of global warming, but taken collectively together we have to be aware that these signals of the warming of the earth by one degree that is now being recorded by scientists all over the world."

LONDON

Comm: "Solar technology companies have reeled in scientists, planners and - most importantly - investors from big European financial institutions. They're seeking millions in venture capital to kick-start a solar revolution.

"Leading the meeting, Dr Jeremy Leggett, director of one of these companies and chairman of the British government's solar taskforce."

Dr Jeremy Leggett, Solar Century: "A few years ago a group of scientists and policy people got together at a conference and came up with a form of words that I think captures this whole dilemma perfectly. If we keep going with greenhouse emissions they said the impact of global warming will be second only to nuclear war and that's the truth of it. At the moment, it is the developing countries that are suffering and their suffering will get much worse. But we won't escape in the developed countries."

Comm: "Jeremy Leggett has presented his conclusions on the likely impact of billion-dollar disasters to big insurance and re-insurance firms, like Lloyds of London and Swiss Re - companies that are swallowing ever-harder as they consider mounting losses. Mind-boggling losses which they attribute specifically to man-made climate change."

Leggett: "The insurance companies who analyse these things don't use conditional language any more. They don't say as they used to a few years ago 'we may be seeing the influence of global warming here.' They're quite categoric and say that we are seeing a dramatic trend and it is going to get much much worse.

"We're living in a world where the global insurance industry keeps a few hundred billion dollars for losses, for all losses in any one year and yet in the current world if natural disasters hit cities then we could lose that entire pool of money in conceivably just a few unlucky rolls of the dice.

"For example a cyclone on Tokyo, a drought related wildfire getting into Los Angeles that could bankrupt the entire global insurance industry, dragging down national economies, maybe even the global economy with it."

Comm: "The cataclysms forecast by the prophets of doom may be yet to materialise, but already the developed world's come pretty close. Here, walls of flame forty metres high set parts of suburban Sydney ablaze after a period of prolonged drought. 7,500 fire fighters, backed by the military struggled to contain high-intensity wildfires on a scale never before documented.

"The growing belief that the increased frequency of extreme weather events is closely linked to global warming has been matched by rising anger that poor countries are the ones which are paying the price for the rich world's pollution.

Toepfer: "This is something like an ecological aggression against developing countries. There is also responsibility of those far away being responsible for the emissions of CO2, changing the climate in totally other parts of the world. Everybody knows that that the clean up comes too late and is too expensive. So integrate the cleanup in the development process."

BANGLADESH FLOODS

Comm: "The global insurance industry agrees that the only way to offset vast long-term damage bills is by thinking ahead and investing now. In some places, they're already doing that. Flood deaths in Bangladesh have been dramatically reduced thanks to a unique early warning system: a sophisticated bush telegraph manned by volunteers.

"The world's poor aren't holding their breath waiting for guilt money from the big polluters to start flooding in. They've begun to insure themselves against the elements.

"Here in Nepal, where landslides regularly sweep away rice terraces, villagers have developed simple bio-engineering technologies to protect themselves and their crops.

"Lifestyles are being adapted to deal with disasters, employing homegrown survival solutions such as these.

"High-tech clean energy companies in the rich world are also working on practical alternatives to fossil fuel power .plants. Real solutions, which are already being exported to developing countries. There are high hopes that some developing countries may be able to leap-frog the twentieth century technologies responsible for global warming."

El Ashri: "We all know that developing countries, in order to develop further they will need to use more energy. The question is what kind of energy?"

Toepfer: "I also am convinced that to fight against the CO2 emission is also economic chance to develop new energy sources. Renewable, solar energy, wind energy, these are the energy possibilities for the future and those doing it now, they've also got and economic advantage in the future."

Bob Watson: "If therefore we in the developed world have to work with developing countries to pay them to use cleaner technologies or to protect their forest, I'm perfectly, I believe that that's a perfectly equitable thing to doÖ I think it's quite appropriate to grant resources to flow from the rich countries who already destroyed their environment and are, who are already polluting the environment far worse than any developing country on a per capita basis."

Comm: "Taking stock of the past millennium, the United Nations Secretary-General said humankind had never before done so much in so little time to destroy what sustains us.

"If we don't reverse the trend, he warned, we may not have another thousand years to correct our mistakes."

END