A Sense of Impending Disaster

You know the end is nigh. Now the big brains at Columbia have confirmed it. The Center for Hazards & Risk Research has released a report (PDF chunks of which available here) called Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis. It lists (and maps and charts) the places on Earth most in danger of drought, earthquake, volcano, landslide, flood, or tornado.

Interesting analysis, actually. The writers broke the world's geography into grid squares, and then figured out the population of the grid sectors and each sectors' piece of Gross Domestic Product. This is a good way to handle what I posted about in January, extreme hazard events of low frequency. The problem with risk management -- I think -- is figuring out not just what the odds are of a loss, but how much you're going to lose (and so whether it's worth doing anything about it). But as you might be able to see from the map, many of the most vulnerable regions on the planet are coastal...which is where cities are...which is where people live. Point being, while EHELFs are by definition rare, they also threaten more people and more development than ever before.