FIVE-YEAR RISK TRENDS BY WORLD BANK INCOME GROUP, 2011 TO 2015 5 Year Inform Risk Trends By World Bank Income Group 2011-2015 Low income (35)
Lower middle income (47)
Upper middle income (55)
High income: non OECD (22)
High income: OECD (31)
Significant increase (>0.5)
3
6
4
2
0
Stable (<0.5 / >-0.5)
10
13
8
4
2
Significant decrease (<-0.5)
22
28
43
16
29
(INFORM, 2015)
hazards are among the most potent shocks when it comes to causing long-term impoverishment (ODI et al., 2013). Worldwide, natural disasters are increasing in severity and becoming more costly. Classified as either climate-related or geophysical, natural disasters occur when natural hazards affect human lives and livelihoods. Natural disasters today are mainly attributed to rising climate-related disasters, including storms and floods (CRED, 2015). A World Bank report, Turn Down the Heat, highlights the dramatic effects of global climate and weather extremes as global temperatures rise (World Bank, 2013). The impact of rising global temperatures is disproportionately concentrated in low- and middle-income countries and small island developing States. The poor and most vulnerable populations are likely to be the hardest hit and have the least capacity or access to resources to enable them to adapt and recover. The frequency of droughts has gradually increased in East Africa over the past 50 years, but has declined in West Africa. Somalia, Burundi, Niger, Ethiopia, Mali and Chad were classified as countries with highest relative vulnerability to drought based on a drought vulnerability indicator (Shiferaw et al., 2014).
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CHAPTER 1
A FRAG I LE WO RLD
In sub-Saharan Africa, 90 per cent of food and fodder is produced through rain fed agriculture, which also accounts for more than 70 per cent of the populationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s principal livelihood (Shiferaw et al., 2014). The lives and livelihoods of poor populations, especially women, who account for up to 70 per cent of food production in the region, are most threatened by drought as they possess the lowest adaptive capacities to drought as a result of high levels of chronic poverty. (Gawaya, 2008). Gender, urbanization and humanitarian crises
Urbanization is reshaping our world and the nature of humanitarian crises and response. For the first time in history, more than half of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population lives in cities. As more people settle in the slums of megacities in developing countries, they are in turn increasingly on the front lines of disaster. The rapid growth of urban populations, unprecedented influx of displaced populations and increasing possibility of severe weather events increase the risk of urban humanitarian disasters. Urban population growth has become increasingly concentrated in developing countries, where 1.2 million people are migrating to cities every week (UN-HABITAT, 2013). Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia