Disaster casualty rate down in Bangladesh

Bangladesh should go for calculating disaster losses so that it could make prior investments to reduce peoples' vulnerabilities and economic losses caused by disasters, experts said yesterday.
While casualty rate from disasters came down in Bangladesh and elsewhere, financial loses from a large proportion of damage to local infrastructure, housing has increased which seriously threatens the economies of low-income countries, they said.
The observations came at the launching of Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2011 published by the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) Secretariat.
The report has been prepared on the basis of 130 countries.
UNDP's Comprehensive Disaster Management Programme and the Disaster Management and Relief Division organised the programme at the city's LGED auditorium.
“The proportion of the world's GDP annually exposed to tropical cyclones increased from 3.6 percent in the 1970's to 4.3 percent in the first decade of the 2000s,” said the report.
Economic losses due to floods in South Asia are in absolute terms far smaller than those in the industrialised countries, but relative to the size of South Asia's GDP, they are approximately 15 times greater, it said.
Appreciating Bangladesh's efforts to manage disasters, UNDP Resident Representative Neal Walker said economic loss however is increasing every single day.
The report said extensive disasters are responsible for a large proportion of damage to local infrastructure, housing and livelihoods of low-income households.
Saber Hossain Chowdhury, chair of All Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change, said development partners could help Bangladesh do the accounting of the losses incurred by disasters.