Natural disasters are happening more often, and having an ever more dramatic impact on the world in terms of both their human and economic costs. While the number of lives lost has declined in the past 20 years - 800,000

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Critically examine the view that natural hazards appear to be occurring with increased frequency.

For my essay I will looking at different case studies and reasons why it appears that there are more natural disasters as time goes on.  There were 497 reported natural disasters - hazards that took a significant human toll - between 1974 and 1978. The last five years have seen 1,897 of them, a nearly three fold increase. Between 1974 and 1978, 195 million people were killed by such disasters or needed emergency aid; there were 1.5 billion such victims in the past five years.

The definition of a natural disaster, according to Webster's New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.6) is:  any event or force of nature that has catastrophic consequences, such as avalanche, earthquake, flood, forest fire, hurricane, lightning, tornado, tsunami, and volcanic eruption.

 The definition of increased frequency according to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition is: The number of measurements in an interval of a frequency distribution. And also the ratio of the number of times an event occurs in a series of trials of a chance experiment to the number of trials of the experiment performed.

Natural disasters are happening more often, and having an ever more dramatic impact on the world in terms of both their human and economic costs.
While the number of lives lost has declined in the past 20 years - 800,000 people died from natural disasters in the 1990s, compared with 2 million in the 1970s - the number of people affected has risen. Over the past decade, the total affected by natural disasters has tripled to 2 billion.

Some 75 percent of the world’s population live in areas that have been affected at least once by either an earthquake, a tropical cyclone, flooding or drought between 1980 and 2000.

In December’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean, an estimated 250,000-300,000 people were killed or are still missing, while millions of lives have been upturned, socially and economically, by its impact.

The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which publishes a World Disasters Report annually, calculates that from 1994 to 1998, reported disasters averaged 428 per year. From 1999 to 2003, this figure shot up by two-thirds to an average of 707 natural disasters each year. The biggest rise occurred in developing countries, which suffered an increase of 142 percent.

In 2003, there were approximately 700 natural disasters, which killed an estimated 75,000 people and caused about US $65 billion worth of damage, according to a 2004 report by Munich Re, an international insurance company.

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As you can see by the information it appears to be that natural disasters are happening more and more frequently as time goes on.  But is this really the case?

The latest natural disaster, the hurricane to hit New Orleans in American was well documented, due to the size and importance America has on the world.  But have all natural disasters been reported?  Due to the development of media natural disasters all over the world can now be reported, allowing everyone to know about these events.  However hundreds of years ago when media did not exist natural disasters could not ...

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