Typhoon Haiyan: a survivor walks among debris in Tacloban, the capital of Leyte province in the Philippines. Photograph: Noel Celis/AFP Getty Images
Read the commentary of "The Guardian" which seems pointing the corrupt government as responsible for the calamity victims.. "people are more likely to live in substandard housing, some of it shamelessly jerrybuilt by greedy landlords and authorized by corrupt authorities " … They are.. the majority victims of Yolanda's life swipe -out.
Indeed, right! In every calamity, majority of the victims are poor and merely living in temporary shanty houses. Most of the survivors are living in the concrete buildings which majorities of them are middle class and upper class.
"Typhoon Haiyan: there is worse to come"
The first disaster to kill more than a million people could happen within our lifetimes
No single typhoon, flood or drought anywhere in the world can be blamed on global warming, but the inexorable rise of the global thermometer is nevertheless an indicator of worse to come. Cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are temperature-dependent phenomena. They become increasingly hazardous as sea temperatures rise. As average global temperatures increase, so does the likelihood of ever greater extremes of local temperature. So does evaporation, and so does the capacity of air to carry ever greater volumes of water vapour. So the lesson of typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines with unparalleled fury on Friday, is that there is more to come, with more deaths, more destruction, more wrecked economies.
This would be true even without global warming. Population growth rates might have declined, but every 60 minutes there are another 8,000 people in the world: about 75 million every year. Most of these are in the developing world, and since so much of the developing world is within and around the tropics, where cyclones are a seasonal hazard, that means there will be more potential victims in the path of any climate-related disaster. For the first time in human history, more people are concentrated in the cities than dispersed in the countryside, and this concentration is expected to continue until almost two-thirds of all humanity lives in the cities. That means that any typhoon that hits an urban region will find more people in the way.
But more than 2 billion people have to survive on incomes of no more than $2 a day, and these too are crowded in cities in and near the tropics. These people are more likely to live in substandard housing, some of it shamelessly jerrybuilt by greedy landlords and authorized by corrupt authorities, or in shanty towns on unstable or marginal land at risk from flood and landslip when the heavens open. The schools built for their children are liable to collapse in earthquake or cyclone, any hospitals available to them are likely to be reduced to rubble along with their houses.
The Philippines government, with a long and cruel experience of typhoons, had a comprehensive disaster management strategy, plenty of warning, and it knew what to expect. The second lesson of Haiyan is that even those who make ready for bad weather may be overwhelmed by even worse.
The final lesson is that, sooner or later, some unparalleled disaster will slam with little or no warning into some crowded city managed by a heedless authority in a country run by a corrupt or brutal oligarchy. It could be the first disaster to kill more than a million, and it could happen within our lifetimes. There may be worse to come, and not just because of climate change. – The Guardian
