China, India, Indonesia at highest economic risk from disasters: Maplecroft

Emerging economies like China, India, the Philippines and Indonesia posed greater risk to investors than the US and Japan, which have the highest economic exposure to natural hazards, as the former lack the capacity to combat the impacts of major disasters, says analysis and mapping firm Maplecroft.

According to the `Natural Hazards Risk Atlas 2011' (NRHA), released by the firm, these countries were not only at 'high' and 'extreme risk' from economic exposure to natural hazards, like earthquakes, tsunamis, tropical cyclones, floods and drought, they also lacked capacity to mitigate the disruption of a major events on their societies and economies.

The NRHA aims to help assess and compare risks and resilience to natural hazards across the world and the study includes indices and interactive subnational maps of 12 natural hazard risks and measures the overall economic exposure and socio-economic resilience of countries to natural hazards.

The study rates 196 countries with US, Japan, China and Taiwan being placed under "extreme risk" nations in that order for absolute economic exposure to natural hazards.

However, several countries from among emerging economies are not far behind with Mexico (5), India (6), Philippines (7), Turkey (8) and Indonesia (9) classified under 'high risk' placed in the top 10. The only other countries rated as 'high risk' are Italy (10) and Canada (11).

Natural hazards have proved to be more costly to the world economy in 2011 than in any year recorded earlier. The economic impact of the tsunami in Japan, tornadoes in the US, the Christchurch earthquake and flooding in Australia has been assessed to a massive $265 billion total for the first six months of the year.