What is a humanitarian disaster?

There’s no simple answer. The Red Cross Red Crescent movement -- the biggest humanitarian network in the world -- uses a definition from the Belgium-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters:

“…a situation or event, which overwhelms local capacity, necessitating a request to national or international level for external assistance; an unforeseen and often sudden event that causes great damage, destruction and human suffering”.

This definition stresses sudden impact disasters. There are, however, other situations which attract the help of humanitarians which can have more gradual but far graver humanitarian consequences – particularly conflict and diseases.

Unfortunately, many, if not most, humanitarian crises are made up of several kinds of disaster. Professional relief workers refer to disasters that overlap with war, civil war or other forms of civil strife as “complex emergencies”.

The U.N.’s Inter-Agency Steering Committee (IASC) defines a complex emergency as

“ … a humanitarian crisis in a country, region or society where there is total or considerable breakdown of authority resulting from internal or external conflict and which requires an international response that goes beyond the mandate or capacity of any single agency …”

What are the main types of humanitarian disaster?

Disease This is the biggest killer. AIDS, diarrhoea, tuberculosis and malaria are just the top four in a long list of lethal epidemics and communicable diseases which disproportionately impact the least developed countries.

Famine/drought Food and water shortages may not be as deadly as disease but they affect huge swathes of the global population.

Hunger is often caused by bad distribution or government mismanagement, rather than production shortages, so a lot of aid specialists argue that famine is rarely an entirely natural disaster.

Conflict At any one time there are many conflicts raging, most receiving little media attention. While deaths from conflict are, comparatively speaking, few, the number of people affected is huge.

Among the people fleeing conflict, refugees are legally defined by Geneva Conventions as those who go to another country, while internally displaced people are those who are forced to leave their homes but do not cross an internationally recongnised border.

Natural disasters These are the disasters that tend to capture most of the media coverage – sudden onset crises which appear to be caused by natural forces like floods and earthquakes. But they are not the biggest killers.

There is some debate over whether extreme weather events -- heat waves and cold waves – which attract the attention of humanitarian relief agencies should be classified as natural disasters or not.

Technological disasters The purest form of man-made disasters. The best-known of these are the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl (Ukraine) of 1986 and the Bhopal (India) chemical poisoning of 1984.

Which disasters have the biggest impact? Disease is the biggest killer but gets little attention in the media. Natural disasters kill relatively few but interrupt the lives of huge numbers of people. And it’s a similar picture for conflict.

Disaster	Deaths per year	People affected per year
Disease	7,400,000 for top 4 diseases
Famine/drought	475,000	4,000,000
Conflict	200,000	16,000,000 refugees 25,000,000 displaced
Natural disasters	30,000	174,000,000
Technological disasters	9,000	-

Sources: World Health Report 2002 (U.N. World Health Organisation - WHO), World Disasters Report 2004 (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies - IFRC)

What are the biggest killer diseases?

Humanitarians tend to focus on communicable diseases which particularly afflict people in poor countries.

Health statisticians find it hard to classify the cause of death from diseases, since there are complex inter-linkages between diseases and other health problems. For example, one impact of AIDS is to make the sufferer far more susceptible to other diseases and to respiratory infections.

Likewise, hunger reduces the body’s ability to fight off disease. The net result is that it is almost certain that the estimates of death by disease in the table below are too low.

To provide a yardstick, the table includes some of the other big global killers. Note the high toll from traffic accidents, which has led some road safety campaigners to say this is the world’s fifth worst communicable disease.

Total infectious and parasitic disease	18.4 million
HIV/AIDS	2.8 million
Diarrhoea	1.8 million
Tuberculosis	1.6 million
Malaria	1.2 million
Measles	0.8 million
Other killers
Traffic accidents	1.2 million
Suicide	0.9 million
Cirrhosis of the liver	0.8 million

Source: The World Health Report 2003 (WHO)

What are the main types of natural disaster? Leaving aside the dispute over whether famine and drought should be classified as natural disasters or not, flooding is the most significant form of natural disaster, and by some margin.

Type of hazard	Annual deaths ‘94-03	Population affected annually ’94-03
Floods	9350	140 million
Windstorms	6100	31 million
Earthquakes	7500	3.4 million
Extreme temperatures	1250	630,000
Avalanches/mudslides	950	280,000
Volcanic eruptions	50	98,000

Source: World Disasters Report 2004, IFRC

What the annual averages conceal is the severity of individual natural disasters. This table shows some of the worst disasters ever recorded.

Date	Type	Location	Deaths
1887	Flood	China, Huang He, or Yellow River	1 million
1556	Quake	China, Shaansi	830,000
1737	Quake	India, Calcutta	300,000
1970	Cyclone	East Pakistan (Bangladesh)	300,000
1976	Quake	China, Tangshan	255,000
1138	Quake	Syria, Aleppo	230,000
2004	Tsunami	Indian Ocean	226,000
1920	Quake	China, Gansu	200,000
c893	Quake	Iran, Ardabil	150,000
1923	Quake	Japan, Kanto	143,000
1991	Cyclone	Bangladesh	138,000
1948	Quake	Turkmenistan	110,000
1908	Quake/Floods	Italy, Messina	est.70,000-100,000
1815	Eruption	Indonesia, Tambora volcano	92,000
1902	Eruption	Martinique, Mt. Pelee	35-40,000
1883	Eruption/Tsunami	Indonesia, Krakatoa	36,000
2003	Quake	Iran, Bam	31,000

Source: Reuters