Link Banana

Both awe and sadness seem like proper responses to this post from The Big Picture. These two really got me.

The Boston Globe’s Ideas section recently featured this interesting idea: natural disaster may actually be an economic good for the affected country.

Rebuilding efforts serve as a short-term boost by attracting resources to a country, and the disasters themselves, by destroying old factories and old roads, airports, and bridges, allow new and more efficient public and private infrastructure to be built, forcing the transition to a sleeker, more productive economy in the long term.

“When something is destroyed you don’t necessarily rebuild the same thing that you had. You might use updated technology, you might do things more efficiently. It bumps you up,” says Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University. “Disasters help people think about things differently.”

But there is this cogent counter-argument:

“Over any reasonably relevant period of time, society is not made wealthier by destroying resources,” he adds. If it were, “Beirut should be one of the wealthiest places in the world.”

Passport has pulled some maps from an interesting study, “Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis” (PDF).

They divided the world up into sub-national swathes of land and analyzed population and disaster data going back about thirty years for six disaster types: drought, flooding, cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides. For reasons of data accuracy and availability, the results are relative rather than absolute likelihoods that disasters will occur in various corners of the globe.

The study focuses on more significantly populated areas amounting to about half of the world’s land area. It approaches loss as potential damage to that which is “valuable but vulnerable includ[ing] people, infrastructure, and environmentally important land uses.” And what’s more, based on data from a Brussels-based research center, the study hints that disaster frequency is increasing.

It’s often said that a near-death experience is the surest way to understand what’s important in life. If Edward Wong’s story about Wang Zhijun and Li Wanzhi is to be believed, that’s exactly what’s happened for the couple.

“The only thing we had was each other,” Mr. Wang said. “We encouraged each other to live on, and we said once we got out, we’d live a good life and care for each other. Now we have a new start.”

Given the perceived causal linkage between Hurricane Katrina and greater popular understanding of the dangers of climate change, this could have interesting results:

[Tom Knutson] has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming.

He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues ”against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”

The study, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, predicts that by the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent.

This is a few days old, but it’s point is still valuable. Though many would like to see China as a country as backward as Burma’s present or it’s own past, Bridget Kendell points out that it’s treated it’s disaster much better than Burma has.

Whether because the eyes of the world are upon it in this Olympic year, or because the Chinese themselves, particularly the increasingly affluent and empowered urban middle class, demand more of their own government, these days in China - unlike in Burma - there seems to be a greater sense of the need to be accountable.

Passport has collected a few maps that show the extent of the damage done by the cyclone that struck Burma over the weekend. This before and after set is, as is usually the case with hurricanes, rather striking.

Sad but true: I willfully ignored this because the reported death toll yesterday was only around 350. Today reports are saying that more than 22,000 are confirmed dead and that the number may climb even higher. It also appears that the Red Cross and other aid agencies have been allowed in by the ruling junta.