Chapter 2 - 2011: Natural Disasters Reviewed
This chapter begins by exploring some of the overall disaster statistics in 2011 in comparison with recent years. It takes a brief look at some of the disasters that occurred in 2011 outside the developed world and will examine the ongoing relief and reconstruction efforts following the two 2010 mega-disasters, the floods in Pakistan and the earthquake in Haiti. The third section of this chapter looks at the imperfect science of measuring economic damage caused by disasters, followed by a fourth section, which will analyze trends in international disaster response, looking at developments related to international disaster response law and some of the debates and developments surrounding the humanitarian cluster system. Last but not least, we will review international humanitarian disaster funding for 2011 to see how well (or how poorly) disaster responses were funded in the past year.