The EM-DAT database (a WHO initiative) is a huge repository of information about disasters that has been built up over more than 40 years, and Advance Aid has already been mining this data to help develop its business plan – if you can use historical data to predict where disasters are most likely to happen, you can certainly fine-tune your pre-positioning and warehousing strategy.

Now SciDevNet has produced a whole section of its website devoted to covering “Remote Sensing for Natural Disasters” .

SciDevNet’s Sian Lewis puts this into context, “Developing countries suffer more than 95 per cent of all deaths caused by natural disasters.  Their high population densities and poor infrastructure, coupled with unstable landforms and exposure to severe weather events, makes them particularly vulnerable…Just last year (2008), natural disasters affected 214 million people, killed more than 235,000 and cost more than US$190 billion.”

And she goes on to outline how satellite technology can make a difference, “Remote sensing — the science of acquiring information about the Earth using remote instruments, such as satellites — is inherently useful for disaster management. Satellites offer accurate, frequent and almost instantaneous data over large areas anywhere in the world. When a disaster strikes, remote sensing is often the only way to view what is happening on the ground.”

But there are, inevitably, problems – shortage of money, low bandwidth Internet connections, the lack of active space programmes (understandably) amongst developing countries, and a linked lack of political awareness of the role that satellite data can play in helping with development and combating disasters.

But there are developing countries with satellites – the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced plans in October for two Earth observation satellites, which will join six already in orbit.  South Africa launched its first commercial-grade satellite in September.  Brazil, China, Thailand and Vietnam have satellites, as do Algeria and Nigeria.

Lewis ends with a plea, “The time is ripe for engaging developing country researchers and policymakers in remote sensing for disaster management.  Data and software costs are plummeting, information communication technology is developing quickly, and tools such as Google Earth are starting to get policymakers enthused about satellite imagery.”

And whilst our attention here in the North is grabbed from time to time by a particularly newsworthy disaster, which affects a particularly large number of people, the scale of the ongoing displacements is what should be being noted.

Now two UN bodies, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) have come up with a report that tries to quantify, they say for the first time, the number of people forced to flee their homes because of climate change.

And it’s a big number – 36 million people were driven from their homes by rapid-onset natural disasters in 2008.  China’s Sichuan earthquake accounted for 15 million of these, but climate-related disasters displaced 90 percent of the rest.

This compares with 4.6 million people being internally displaced last year by conflict, and 42 million people in total who were living as refugees or internally displaced persons.