Natural hazards

ISSUES

Natural hazards

The constant rise in the number of victims that has been noted over the last two decades can essentially be explained not by an increase in the number of unpredictable occurrences, but rather by the increasing vulnerability of humankind to such events. This is due to anarchic development in high-risk zones, to the concentration of population on the coast and to the shortage of information systems. Natural disasters are also amplified by the imbalances caused by man-made changes (soil cover) and by climatic variability, to the point where it is difficult to distinguish between what is natural and what is linked to human activity. Some hazards such as volcanic eruptions have been studied for a long time now and have benefited from technological developments in surveillance tools which make them relatively easy to forecast. Others still resist such predictions, such as earthquakes or tsunamis, which are triggered by underwater earthquak...

NEWS

Italy judge says deadly L'Aquila quake was foreseeable

China pandas 'panicked' as forest home jolted in quake

Land degradation causes up to 5% loss in farm output

Univers GoodPlanet par Netvibes

DEBATES

When Prevention is Better than Relief

Peter Singer

When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March, Brian Tucker was in Padang, Indonesia. Tucker was working with a colleague to...

Li Bingbing : "Chinese forests: Our Lifeline for Sustained Prosperity"

Each time I travel along the Yangtze River, I remember the...

Russia is Burning

For over a month, Moscow has been boiling in 40-degree (100...

FOCUS

Nobel Price of ecology

Designed to recognize grassroots environmental heroes, the Goldman Environmental Prize, founded by Richard and Rhoda Goldman in 1989 In San Francisco, is awarded annually to individuals from the six inhabited continental regions for sustained and significant efforts to...

VIDEOS

18/08/2011	Nearly 50 square miles of ice broke off the Sulzberger Ice Shelf on the...	21/06/2010	In response to the Dzud which killed almost 20% of livestock in Mongolia,...
23/12/2009	Christopher Field tells us about how ecosystems can contribute to a...	16/12/2009	Liu Shaw Chen, director of a research centre on climate change tells us...

GREEN TIPS

Vegetalized barriers against the tsunami

From 2006 to 2007, the government of Tamil Nadu, a state at India’s land’s end (in the south-east) and the...

INDICATORS

CHECK OUT THE STATE OF THE WORLD ON OUR 3D GLOBE