More natural disasters due to climate change are on the way and we must be ready for them, writes Salvano Briceño
In January, in the worst winter storm for eight years, more than 45 Europeans died. Men, women and children were crushed by collapsing walls and falling machinery, trapped in cars flattened by uprooted trees, blown off buildings, and even swept off the road by the force of the wind.
Millions of homes were left in the dark, thousands of people were injured, and tens of millions could not get to work because roads were closed, and railways and airports shut down in Britain, Holland and Germany.
These things took place in a continent with the longest tradition of scientific weather observation, the most sophisticated warning systems, and the greatest investment in government and safety legislation.
So the death and destruction provide lessons both for Europe and for the wider world. Two years ago, 168 nations met in Kobe, Japan, to agree a worldwide framework for disaster preparedness and disaster mitigation. European nations were among the leaders of the debate.
The lesson of Kyrill, the name given to the cyclonic storm that swept from the north Atlantic across the face of northern Europe and left a trail of devastation from Scotland to Russia on January 17th-19th, is that everybody has much to learn. The nations of western and northern Europe may be relatively economically secure and technologically advanced, but they are still vulnerable to high winter winds. And the episode was yet another cruel reminder of the far greater fragility of life and livelihood in the developing world, where violent tropical storms are a seasonal hazard, and where disasters caused by vulnerability to natural hazards annually claim the greatest number of victims.
But there may be a deeper lesson yet: Europeans are beginning to realise that they too, may become increasingly at risk in a changing world. Just as Kyrill gathered force off Newfoundland in Canada and prepared to take Europe by storm, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development predicted that steadily rising temperatures could mean an end to the Alpine sports that generate wealth for mountain communities.
Within 45 years, researchers warned, 75 per cent of Alpine glaciers could have vanished. All but the highest ski resorts would be forced to close. But the melting of the glaciers, and the switch from snow to rain in the mountains, would inevitably mean greater hazard from avalanches and floods, at greater cost to communities in the valleys.
And on the day Kyrill began to fade, the US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration warned that global warming could be accelerating because carbon dioxide levels in the planetary atmosphere were higher than expected in 2006, perhaps because of drought in the Amazon, and forest fires and baking weather in Europe. Could a warmer world mean more frequent and more terrible storms, more fierce heat waves, more prolonged droughts, more disastrous flooding? For more than a decade, climate scientists have warned of a possible connection between global warming and greater risk of climate-related disasters. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, expected tomorrow, will either confirm their fear or keep the question open and will certainly set a new agenda for research into human vulnerability.
In 2006 there was a significant increase in disastrous floods worldwide - 226, compared with an average over the past five years of 162, according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Belgium.
There was also a small increase in the number of "extreme temperature" events: 30 heat waves or ice storms compared with an annual average of 23. The good news was that there were many fewer destructive windstorms - 66 compared to the annual average of 106 - but within the cascade of data there was yet another jolt for Europe.
Unexpectedly, three European countries ranked in the global top 10 in terms of deaths from disasters triggered by natural hazards last year. Heatwaves claimed an estimated 1,000 lives in both Belgium and the Netherlands, and Ukraine too entered the premier league when hundreds died in a sudden cold snap.
So the challenge for Europe is the same as the challenge for the rest of the world: to make hazard awareness and disaster reduction a priority: in government offices, at every level of industrial and business life, in schools, on the streets, on the ski slopes. The challenge is to become aware of the link between environmental degradation and the dangers ahead. The challenge is to make Europe's individuals as well as its institutions aware of the forces of nature and of the increasing vulnerability. More floods and forest fires, ice storms and heat waves, landslides and windstorms are on the way. We must be ready for them and that means giving risk reduction a higher priority.
• Salvano Briceñois director of the secretariat of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction in Geneva