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Red Cross prepares for worst

Peruvian earthquake
The Red Cross helps in disasters such as June's Peruvian earthquake in which at least 50 people died  


GENEVA, Switzerland -- The International Red Cross is calling for a rething on how aid is distributed to meet the tide of ever-growing climate-related natural disasters.

The organisation wants international aid to be more focused on local economic and social needs.

The number of geophysical disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions has remained fairly steady over the past decade.

But hydro-meteorological disasters, provoked mainly by weather -- including avalanches, landslides and extreme temperatures -- have more than doubled in the second half of the last decade.

In its World Disasters Report 2001, the Red Cross says that rather than concentrating on rebuilding damaged infrastructure, aid efforts should be directed at "rebuilding people's livelihoods."

"Too often, efforts at reconstruction after a major disaster don't lead to recovery," Didier Cherpitel, secretary-general of the Geneva-based federation, said on Thursday.

"Instead, they end up rebuilding the risk of danger in future disasters by ignoring economic realities."

Badly thought-out aid can do more harm than good in the long run, leaving victims vulnerable to future catastrophes, the report says.

It cited the case of Venezuela, where survivors of devastating 1999 mudslides were moved to safer but remote areas but, unable to find work, had returned to danger zones.

The report said that 53 percent of aid projects worldwide focused on rebuilding infrastructure, while just 10 percent helped boost economic recovery in disaster areas.

"The urgency to spend money, preferably in the shortest possible time, seems to supersede rational thinking," Belgium-based aid specialist Debarati Guha-Sapir said.

The report also looked at what it called "leakage" of aid money, giving the example of flood-prone Bangladesh, where it said 60 percent of flood relief funds donated from 1990 to 1995 went in paying foreign consultants.

The report said that last year 752 natural disasters were registered, against 609 in 1999 and 481 in 1998.

A total of 253,378 people were affected, down from the decade's peak of 344,761 in 1998 when El Nino, the warming in the Pacific Ocean, brought violent weather to many parts of the world.

Peter Walker, director of the IFRC's Asia Regional Office, pinned the blame for rising climate-related disasters on changing land use and increasing urbanisation in flood-prone areas and global warming.

"It is evidence of climate change," he told Reuters.

Globalisation was also accentuating the problems of the world's poorest states in dealing with natural disasters the relief agency argues.

"It is more a change of attitude. Every investment now has to be measured in market terms against targets and expected return rather than alleviation of poverty," Walker said.





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