Natural Disasters Displaced Over 19 Million People in 2014, Report Shows

Robert Martin
Published: July 21,2015



 
Hundreds of natural disasters take place all over the earth each year, but what kind of impact are these catastrophic events leaving on humanity?
A staggering new report from The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) found that 19.3 million people in 100 countries were displaced by natural hazards in 2014. Floods and storms made up most of these disasters, with the typhoons and floods in India and the Philippines causing the majority of displacement.
More than 1.7 million of those displaced by natural events in 2014 were forced out by geophysical disasters, including earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Using data from international governments, NGOs, the UN and more, the group found that an average of 26.4 million people have been displaced by natural hazards each year since 2008. That's nearly one person forced to leave their home every second. That number is down from the previous two years, but historical trends indicate that displacement rates are only going up.
According to The New York Times, council director Alfredo Zamudio told reporters in Geneva that the organization's "historical analysis reveals you are 60 percent more likely to be displaced by disasters today than you were in the 1970s."
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The IDMC links this increased vulnerablity to the rapid growth rate of populations in developing countries. The organization reports that developing countries have seen a 326 percent population increase since 1970 and cited the nations of Haiti, South Sudan and Niger where urban populations have more than doubled since 2000.
The report goes on to indicate that while lower middle-income nations only account for 36 percent of the world's population, they saw 61 percent of displacement in 2014. In its reporting, the IDMC also found that displacement in many cases is not a short-term issue with several reported cases of people going as long as 26 years without homes after natural disasters.
Looking forward, the report suggests that in order to prevent further displacement problems, "Governments should prioritize measures to advance solutions and strengthen the resilience of people whose displacement risks are becoming protracted, or have already become so. They include people whose former homes have become permanently inaccessible or unsafe, informal settlers, poor tenants and people who face discrimination based on their class, ethnicity, gender or age."
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