Abstract
While some progress is being made in the reduction of losses due to natural hazards such as earthquakes, more progress is needed. Casualty and economic loss trends for the twentieth century are first examined. As opposed to widely publicised claims of rapidly increasing loss trends, we find decreasing trends for both casualties and losses, when population growth and urbanisation are accounted for. In order to provide a single measure of the significance of disasters, the concept of Economic Adjusted Life Years (EALY) is introduced, which extends Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY) as used in the health field to include economic costs of disasters. EALYs are calculated for a number of major twentieth century earthquakes, finding that millions of years of human productivity have been lost in these events. This equates to, case-by-case, setting back a particular group years to decades in its development. Lastly, the temporal patterns of twentieth century earthquake fatalities are examined, finding a significant diurnal variation. That is, earthquakes that occur at night have relatively more fatalities than they would if they occurred in daylight. Without accounting for diurnal variation, mortality and morbidity estimates can be off by a factor of as much as ± 34%.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Anand S, Hanson K (1997) Disability-adjusted life years: a critical review. J Health Econ 16:685ʿ702
Anand S, Jonson K, Anand S, Jonson K (1995) Disability adjusted life year: a critical review, Working Paper Series 95.06. Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Boston, MA
Homedes N (2000) The Disability-Adjusted Life Year (Daly) definition, measurement and potential use. Human Capital Development and Operations Policy Working Paper. World Bank, Washington, DC. http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/hnp/hddflash/workp/wp_00068.html
Litan RE (1999) The impacts of natural disasters: a framework for loss estimation. Board on Natural Disasters, Commission on Geosciences, Environmental, and Resources, National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington, DC
Scawthorn C, Iemura H, Yamada Y (1978) World large destructive earthquakes since 1900. Annual Meeting of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, Sendai, Japan
World Bank (1993) World development report 1993: investing in health. Oxford University Press, New York
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Scawthorn, C. (2011). Disaster Casualties – Accounting for Economic Impacts and Diurnal Variation. In: Spence, R., So, E., Scawthorn, C. (eds) Human Casualties in Earthquakes. Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9455-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9455-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9454-4
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9455-1
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)