Abstract
The purpose of the paper is to present an extended literature review with statistical results on natural environmental hazards relying on data from the last 117 years (1900–2016). More specifically, inspired by a statement in Smith’s (1996) book “the rich lose their money but the poor lose their lives” in this study we detect the high-risk areas and correlate them with economic characteristics in an attempt to accept or reject the above statement. Particularly, we hypothesize that the most developed countries have high economic losses and that the least developed countries have great fatalities. In this way we examine if fatalities are proved to be significant in the least developed countries and the total economic damages are proved to be significant in the most developed countries. A number of graphical presentations come to strengthen the statistical results by using map visualization techniques.
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Notes
Part of the Center for Research in the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), which is established by the School of Public Health, Universite Catholique de Louvain
Will be analyzed in a following sub-section.
Based on Smith (1996), biophysical hazards include extreme temperatures, epidemics and wildfires.
The term meteorological hazard does not exist in Smith’s classification.
http://www.emdat.be/database Accessed: 05 May 2017
The currency used in all cases is the American Dollar. No local currency units are used so that the results of the analysis will be comparable.
All maps presented in the paper have been created using the R Studio. The R packages and routines are available on request.
The rest columns have been calculated by dividing the aggregated value of each fatality or economic loss to the occurrence in an attempt to estimate the average level of deaths, injuries, affected people, homeless people and economic losses respectively, using as a weight the value of appearance.
The average injured people in Solomon Is due to biological hazards equals to 186,000 and to be precise, biological hazards (and more specifically viral disease) occurred once in 2013 and one in 2016 causing none injured and 372,000 injured respectively leading to (372,000/2 = 186,000) per event.
Those amounts have been calculated by dividing the total amount of each fatality or loss of each country to the occurrence of each country. That gives us the average fatality or loss per occurrence.
Also examined by Goeschle and Managi (2018)
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology and the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI). We would like to thank the Editor Professor Shunsuke Managi and the anonymous reviewers for helpful and constructive comments that improved the quality of the paper. Any remaining errors are solely the authors responsibility.
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Halkos, G., Zisiadou, A. Examining the Natural Environmental Hazards Over the Last Century. EconDisCliCha 3, 119–150 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41885-018-0037-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41885-018-0037-2