One person per second displaced by disaster in past 7 years: report

One person every second has been displaced by a disaster in the past seven years, with over 19 million people forced to flee their homes in 2014 alone, a new report showed Monday.

Disaster displacement is on the rise and there are more and more man-made factors that drive an overall increasing trend in disaster displacement, such as rapid economic development, urbanization and population growth in hazard-prone areas, said the report, released here by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

It revealed how 17.5 million people were forced to flee their homes last year by disasters brought on by weather-related hazards like floods and storms, and 1.7 million by geophysical hazards such as earthquakes.

"The millions of lives devastated by disasters is more often a consequence of ill-conceived man-made infrastructures and policies, rather than the forces of mother nature," said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the NRC.

"A flood is not in itself a disaster, the catastrophic consequences happen when people are neither prepared nor protected when it hits," he said.

The report pointed out that today, the likelihood of being displaced by a disaster is 60 percent higher than it was four decades ago, and an analysis of 34 cases showed that disaster displacement can last for up to 26 years.

According to the report, people in both rich and poor countries can be caught in protracted, or long-term, displacement.

In the United States, more than 56,000 people are still in need of housing assistance following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and 230,000 people have been unable to establish new homes in Japan following the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident.

The report -- The Global Estimates: People displaced by disasters -- came at a crucial time this year as world leaders are expected to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals at a summit at the UN headquarters in New York in September. Endi