The only other African country on the list, released by the Belgium-based Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), is Zambia, where vast tracts of agricultural land were flooded by the bloated Zambezi River.
The list is based on a scale measuring the impact of the disaster according to the number of people killed and affected per 100,000 inhabitants.*
"Remember that the number of dead in the tsunami [caused by an undersea quake in 2004] in Indonesia was 135,000 or so, and the numbers in Haiti [hit by an earthquake in January 2009] will probably also be that," said CRED director Debarati Guha-Sapir.
| Total killed and affected by natural disasters in 2009 per 100,000 inhabitants | |
| • | Guatemala 18,382 |
| • | Namibia 16,559 |
| • | Philippines 15,002 |
| • | Taiwan (China) 10,047 |
| • | China, P Rep 5,183 |
| • | Zambia 4,872 |
| • | Vietnam 4,312 |
| • | Honduras 4,145 |
| • | American Samoa 3,833 |
| • | Paraguay 3,416 |
| Source: CRED | |
The floods in Namibia - with a total population of 2.2 million - destroyed the livelihoods of least 350,000 people. The Zambian floods disrupted at least 600,000 lives in a population of 12.9 million people.
Guatemala, in Central America, tops the list; it was hit by the worst drought in 30 years, affecting 2.5 million of its 14 million people.
*The population figures in this IRIN report are those used by the UN Population Fund in its report, State of the World Population 2009.
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