New Zealand economist measures loss of healthy life among disaster survivors

Survivors of the deadly Canterbury earthquake of February 2011 lost about 150 days of " healthy life" on average in the aftermath, an economist who advised the United Nations on assessing the human impacts of natural disasters said on Wednesday.

Professor Ilan Noy, chair in the economics of disasters at Victoria University, said he had devised a tool to assess the total number of "lifeyears," or healthy years, people had lost due to death, injuries, being otherwise significantly affected such as having to evacuate their homes and the financial damages incurred.

"By my calculations New Zealand as a nation lost 180,000 lifeyears because of the 2011 Canterbury earthquake. This amounts to about 15 days per person in New Zealand or around 150 days for each person in Canterbury if you break it down to that region," Noy said in a statement.

"Globally, on average the world loses about 40 million lifeyears per year because of disasters, the vast majority in low and middle-income countries."

The basic premise of the measuring tool was that the value of human life should ethically be considered as equal everywhere, while the value of monetary damages was not, meaning a dollar lost in a high-income country such as New Zealand imposed a less adverse impact on society than a dollar lost in a lower-income country.

"This way of measuring allows us to more meaningfully talk about the global burden of natural disasters compared to the global burden of other threats and risks such as terrorism and diseases," said Noy.

His measurement index is included in the new United Nations Global Assessment Report issued last week, and he will present the index at the UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, from March 14 to 18.

The city of Christchurch and the surrounding Canterbury region suffered a series of major earthquakes from September 2010, including a 6.3-magnitude quake that killed 185 people in February 2011. Endi