On the Value of Earthquake Scenario: The Kathmandu Recent Lesson

The past two decades have been punctuated by large-scale natural events that produced huge losses whether related to hydrological, atmospheric, or even rare geological hazards. Over the second half of the last century, the total cost of such catastrophes has been multiplied by a factor of 15, clocking up economic losses of around 66 billion dollars per year during the 1990s (Benson and Clay, 2004). Among these phenomena, there are those that cause disasters, i.e., corresponding to infrequent events that have major consequences on the well-being of the region's population, environment, institutions, and financial equilibrium. The predisposition of a region to suffer an infrequent natural disaster is measured by the event's capacity to generate losses that exceed 1% of GNP, thus resulting in a slow, difficult economic recovery (Munich Re, 2002). According to this definition, geological-related disasters stand out from other natural events: they represent approximately 15% of the world's natural disasters but account for one-third of all victims and economic losses (World Conference on the Disaster Reduction, 2004). The 2000s were not spared either, with the Indonesian earthquake in 2004, and the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti in 2010. Together, these two quakes generated losses of around 40 billion dollars, and more than 280,000 victims, i.e., 31 and 80% of economic and human losses caused by natural events respectively, even though earthquakes only represented 6% of disasters in 2010 (Daniell, 2010). After the 1995 Kobe earthquake that caused economic losses of 178 billion dollars (IFRC, 2002), the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan is known as being the event that caused the greatest direct and indirect costs, on a level to match the scale of the earthquake itself (Mw = 9): a direct economic impact of around 187 billion dollars was estimated, while indirect sanitary, ecological and economic costs related to the ensuing nuclear disaster are expected to reach a long-standing record level. Such observations should serve as a reminder that although public policies are paying more attention to phenomena related to global climate change, earthquakes still remain the natural events that are most likely to have disastrous consequences. Unlike floods or storms that, although likely to increase in frequency and intensity in the years to come in parallel with the climate change, leave us time to analyze future scenarios, earthquakes are already causing huge disasters now. Looking from a different perspective, Brauman (2010) has analyzed recent years human emergencies …