As the human and financial costs of disasters rise, there are increasing demands for evidence that mitigation “pays”. Until this proof exists, many development organisations remain reluctant to pursue risk reduction as a key objective, or even to protect their own projects against potential...

Two worldwide trends in recent decades are commonly noted and sometimes linked in discussing disasters. First, the reported global cost of natural disasters has risen significantly, with a 14-fold increase between the 1950s and 1990s ( Munich Re, 1999 ). During the 1990s, major natural...