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One person every second displaced by disaster: NRC report

Xinhua, July 20, 2015 Adjust font size:

An estimated one person every second has been displaced by a disaster in the past seven years, with 19.3 million people forced to flee their homes in 2014 alone, a new report of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said here on Monday.

According to the new report, "The global estimates: people displaced by disasters," disaster displacement is on the rise and there are more and more man-made factors that drive an overall increasing trend in disaster displacement, like rapid economic development, urbanization, and population growth in hazard-prone areas.

The report reveals how, in 2014, 17.5 million people were forced to flee their homes because of disasters brought on by weather-related hazards such as 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 NRC.

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

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 reveals 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, over 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 comes at a crucial time this year as various past and future policy processes are coming together, including the Sustainable Development Goals which are to be adopted in September, as well as ongoing preparations for the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016. Endit