Billions face floods by 2050: UN expert
Climate change, deforestation factors; more people moving to floodplains

By Tom Spears, Canwest News Service
The Montreal Gazette - Monday, June 14, 2004

OTTAWA – Two billion people worldwide will be vulnerable to devastating floods by 2050 because of climate change, deforestation, rising sea levels and population growth in flood-prone lands, according to UN University.

This is double the number living in such areas today, and “is quite a conservative estimate,” said the UN’s Janos Bogardi. “These are very simple figures, but quite stunning.”

Bogardi is director of a new institute to study the environment and human security that the UN University will open tomorrow in Bonn, Germany. It will study the capacity of governments to respond to natural disasters, and ways to establish sustainable land management practices to reduce the damage of disasters in the first place.

The first issue, Bogardi said, is to figure out who lies in harm’s way. Second, try to tell governments what measures will help. These measures range from keeping people from settling on floodplains to maintaining healthy forests and wetlands, he said. “Everywhere, people are moving to the floodplains,” partly as growing populations need new homes, and because floodplains often have rich soil. Even major cities such as Calcutta and Dhaka are on floodplains, he said.

Ralph Daley, who runs the UN University’s water studies in Canada, said scientists recently showed the government of Malawi the impact of deforestation on a major lake there. It wasn’t a difficult concept once they looked at it, but no one had previously bothered to examine what happened when farmers needed to cut all the trees to get enough firewood.

But he said persuading governments to take precautions against disaster “is a very hard sell.”

In the study of worldwide flooding, scientists found most of the vulnerable people live in China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iran. The death tools are often highest in rural areas of poor countries where disaster preparedness is virtually nonexistent and where there are few hospitals, the university said.

“The thousands of tragic casualties from flooding and Haiti and the Dominican Republic in recent weeks underline the extreme vulnerability of developing countries,” Bogardi said.

In such area, people are less likely to evacuate from flood-prone areas, and in some cases fear leaving and potentially losing their possessions or their property claim.