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Alanna Simpson, Geoscience Australia (Australia)
John Schneider, Geoscience Australia (Australia)
Phil Cummins, Geoscience Australia (Australia)
Jonathan Griffin, Geoscience Australia (Australia)
Trevor Dhu, Geoscience Australia (Australia)
Craig Arthur, Geoscience Australia (Australia)
Miriam Middelmann, Geoscience Australia (Australia)
Monica Osuchowski, Geoscience Australia (Australia)
Ken Dale, Geoscience Australia (Australia)
Roy Leigh, Macquarie University (Australia)
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The Asia-Pacific region experiences some of the world's most violent natural hazards, being exposed to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, cyclones and monsoons. It is also home to many of the world's most populous megacities with large exposures to hazards. Indeed, government statistics reveal an annual average of 2.7 disasters a day in Indonesia alone.
This high risk of natural disasters in developing nations has considerable implications for international aid programs, as disasters significantly compromise the achievement of development goals and the effectiveness of aid investments. Recognising this issue, AusAID requested Geoscience Australia to conduct a broad natural hazard risk assessment of the Asia-Pacific region. This assessment included earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami, cyclone, flood, landslide and wildfire hazards.
A crucial aspect in the assessment of natural hazard risk is the metric used to define a past disaster and therefore the risk of future disasters. For this preliminary study, we used 'significantly impacted population' as the risk metric. This deliberately vague metric is intended to capture the potential for human death, injury, and displacement, as well as prolonged loss of access to essential services and/or shelter, and/or significant damage to agriculture, horticulture and industry such that external assistance is required. However, future work in the Asia-Pacific region will need to be able to determine these vulnerabilities more accurately, considering, for example, the vulnerabilities of buildings and infrastructure in relation to building codes and construction practice, economic cost, and the spatial variability of the intensity of different hazard events.
For this study, we determined the frequencies and magnitudes of a range of sudden-onset natural hazards and evaluated the potential disaster impact. Extra emphasis was placed on relatively rare but high impact events that may not be well reflected in the historical record, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. We concluded that the potential is high for a natural disaster to seriously affect more than one million people in the Asia-Pacific region, with specific risks as follows:
•Megacities in the Himalayan Belt, China, Indonesia and the Philippines are prime candidates for a million-fatality earthquake.
•Hundreds of thousands may be seriously affected by volcanic disasters at least once a decade in Indonesia and once every few decades in the Philippines.
•The population explosion in the mega-deltas of Asia (e.g., Bangladesh), combined with increasing vulnerability to climate change, indicates that a tsunami, flood or cyclone event significantly impacting tens of millions is likely.
•Finally, many Pacific Island nations have a high potential for catastrophic disasters that may significantly impact large proportions of their populations, disasters that are most likely to overwhelm a local and national governments' response and recovery capacity.
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