Poverty and Environmental Hazards - Which Areas Are Most Vulnerable To Natural Disasters?

In the e-book Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis (March 2005), researchers for the World Bank reported that more than half the global population, 3.4 billion people, are vulnerable to natural disasters, especially in Bangladesh, Nepal, the Dominican Republic, Burundi, Haiti, Taiwan, Malawi, El Salvador, and Honduras, where more than 90% of the population of each country is at risk of death from two or more hazards. The regions that statistically face the greatest risks are Central America, East and South Asia, parts of the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. In March 2004 the World Bank reported that two billion people had been affected by natural disasters since the mid-1990s. During the 1990s, 800,000 people were killed in disasters that resulted in direct financial losses of $63 billion annually, not including the cost of emergency relief, cleanup, and rebuilding.