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Researchers
from the Feinstein
International Centre
of the US-based Tufts University have presented a report
about what are the most expensive disasters and what is the
future going to be like. Peter Walker, director of the
centre and one of the researchers, said the point of the
report was not to say, "This is what the future will be
... rather it is to say, 'Stop making wild and
sensationalist predictions and admit the real problem is
that we have been negligent in the data we collect, and so
have placed ourselves in a situation where we are
hard-pressed to say anything meaningful about what the
future will look like.'"
It
is amazing when we realize that u$s2,7 trillion has been
spent on international responses to floods, cyclones and
droughts in the most affected regions: East Africa,
South-East Asia, India and its surrounding areas and Central
America.
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Surprising
numbers is what we can find by researching about past
disasters.
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The
future is "inherently unpredictable", and aid agencies
have "to let go of their old comfortable linear models of
change" and become "adaptive, flexible, and open to
acting upon feedback", said Walker. The Feinstein report said
the likely increases in spending could range from a 32 percent,
taking into account changes in the frequency of disasters, to
1,600 percent when other criteria, such as intensity, were also
taken into account.
There
are three problems with all of this: "Predicting forward 20
years is a very short time in climate change terms; many
scientists are reluctant to give any sort of prediction for such a
short time period," wrote Walker.
"Second,
the differences between the maximum-change models and the minimum
ones are large - we have no idea which prediction is more
true," he noted.
""Finally,
the climate models predict the extreme climate events. We then
have to project how you get from a drought to a famine, from a
hurricane to a hurricane that causes damage, from a flood to
flooded homes; there are huge areas of uncertainty here."
Source:
www.irinnews.org
Walker
concluded that agencies have to "be more concerned with the
rigorous and systematic gathering of data".
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