Huge Risks Loom For World's Megacities
Date: 24-Jan-05
Country: JAPAN
Author: Elaine Lies
Megacities are vulnerable to various dangers including earthquakes, tropical storms and floods, and time to prepare may be running out.
"We are talking about extreme events," Srikantha Herath, an expert in urban risk management at the UN University in Tokyo, told Reuters in Kobe, where the conference is being held.
"It's a question of whether we can prepare in time. Sometimes urbanisation goes so fast you can't intervene."
Others were even more blunt.
"Megacities are becoming the highest vulnerability of all," said Salvano Briceno, head of the UN's disaster reduction body.
Megacities are defined as those with a population of 10 million or more and a dense concentration of people, often in slums formed when people stream in from poor rural areas in search of work.
"People are a different source of vulnerability," said Janos Bogardi, at the Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn. "They settle in slums in some of the most risk-prone areas."
According to UN data, the five largest megacities are the greater Tokyo area with 35.3 million people, Mexico City with 19 million, New York-Newark 18.5 million, Bombay 18.3 million and Sao Paulo 18.3 million.
Frequently growth occurs so rapidly that authorities are overwhelmed. Istanbul, which is highly vulnerable to earthquakes, grew from 1 million people in the 1950s to about 10 million today, a 10-fold increase in half a century.
OVERWHELMING GROWTH
Waves of migrants crowd into existing houses, often substandard, or put up cheap shelters wherever they can, frequently on land left empty because it is dangerous.
In Quito, the capital of Ecuador, many flimsy houses perch on the side of hills where they are vulnerable to landslides caused by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
For Bombay the risk is tropical storms, for San Paulo it is floods and for Mexico it is earthquakes.
While megacities in developing nations may suffer most when disaster strikes, some of the world's most modern urban areas are also at risk, both from dramatic events such as earthquakes and far more frequent ones like floods.
"Some of these big disasters are not occurring in exotic, faraway places but also in Europe," said Bogardi. "We cheat ourselves if we believe we are in safety."
New York is vulnerable to severe weather and experts say it could be hit by an earthquake. The whole east coast of North America could one day be devastated by a tsunami caused by an undersea landslip off the Canary Islands, some scientists say.
Japan is vulnerable to cyclones but the big danger is earthquakes. A quake in Kobe a decade ago killed 6,433 people and caused economic losses of nearly $100 billion.
The greater Tokyo area is a particular concern because of its high population, history of earthquakes and the impact on the world economy if a major quake devastated the capital of the world's number two economy.
Experts say a major quake in the city, which was flattened in 1923 by a quake and subsequent fires, is long overdue.
In a recent report, German reinsurer Munich Re gave it the highest "at risk" rating for natural disasters of 30 megacities, saying that a major earthquake would result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities.
Preparedness lags in many areas. Even in earthquake-aware Japan, the Kobe area long believed it was not at great risk, setting it up for greater damage and loss of life when the 1995 earthquake struck.
"Perhaps the most frightening prospect would be to have a truly megadisaster in a megacity," Jan Egeland, head of UN Emergency Relief, told Reuters this week. "Then we could have not only a tsunami-style casualty rate as we have seen late last year, but we could see 100 times that in a worst case."