China last year was spared the large-scale population dislocations caused by natural disasters that it experienced in 2010. That year monsoon flooding, earthquakes and the like uprooted 15.2 million people from their homes. Yet the figure for 2011 was still 4.5 million, more than for any other country. And natural disasters also left 1,126 people dead or missing last year, we should not forget. It all again underlines the human cost to the vulnerability of the country to natural disasters, and why so much effort and money is being put into monitoring them, preventing them and minimizing their effects.
The numbers are collated by the International Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council. The Centre has been keeping track for the past four years of the effects of extreme weather and geophysical hazards such as earthquakes and volcanoes. It has just presented its most recent report to the Rio+20 environmental conference. Such is the size of China that the change in its figures between 2010 and 2011 accounts for two-fifths of decline in the worldwide number for natural-disaster dislocations from 42.3 million to 14.9 million over the same period.
Asia as a whole and China in particular is the most effected region (see table below). The biggest single displacement in 2011 was of 3.5 million people, caused by monsoon flooding in southern China. Overall, three in a thousand Chinese were displaced by natural disasters last year, which compares with three in a hundred in Sri Lanka, the country with the highest proportion of overall population displaced in 2011. China’s raw and relative numbers for the country would have been higher had the report included what it calls “slower-onset or gradual processes of environmental degradation such as drought and desertification”.
| Disasters causing the largest scale displacements in 2011 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rank | Country | Disaster | Month | No. Displaced |
| 1 | China | Floods | Jun-Sep | 3,514,000 |
| 2 | Thailand | Floods | Aug-Jan | 1,500,000 |
| 3 | Philippines | Floods | Jan-Feb | 672,131 |
| 4 | India | Floods | Aug-Oct | 570,000 |
| 5 | Japan | Earthquake and Tsunami | March | 492,000 |
| 6 | Philippines | Tropical Storm Washi | December | 441,037 |
| 7 | Bangladesh | Floods | July | 400,000 |
| 8 | Japan | Rain and Landslides | July | 400,000 |
| 9 | Sri Lanka | Floods | January | 362,646 |
| 10 | China | Typhoon Muifa | August | 360,000 |
| 13 | China | Typhoon Nesat | Sep-Oct | 300,000 |
| 30 | China | Earthquake (Yunnan) | March | 130,000 |
| Source: International Displacement Monitoring Centre | ||||
