Introduction

According to a new international database of disasters assembled by a team based at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany,between 1900 and 2015 about 35,000 extreme events have caused the death of 8million people[1]and economic losses equivalent to US$7,000 billion. Just over 50 percent of losses are associated with water (floods and drought), which is consistent with recent insured losses data regularly reported by the insurance industry. The authors of the study suggest that, in relative terms, the impacts of disasters have decreased over the century, which is no doubt due to improved legislationand better preparedness and warning systems.

The long-term decreasing trend in the impact of individual disasters, however, is reported at a time of increasing numbers of disasters and more intense extreme factors, as illustrated by the recent occurrence ofthe strongest cyclones on record in different parts of the world. This includesHurricane Patricia (October 2015, landfall in an area with a low populationdensity in western Mexico), as well as two 2016 cyclones: cyclone Fantala(strongest cyclone in the south-west Indian Ocean,April 2016) and cyclone Winston in the south Pacific Basin (February 2016, see below). By sheer luck, none of them created any dramatic damage. Cyclone Winstonwas particularly strong because it occurred under El Niño conditions and in combination with a Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO).[2]

The current El Niño, although atypical in many respects, is alsoone of the most intense recorded so far. It affected and continues to affect hundredsof millions of people in three continents. According to the United Nations (UN)Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “response plans have been completed in 13countries, requesting some US$3.6 billion to meet critical needs for food andagricultural support, as well as nutrition, health and emergency water andsanitation needs.”As some countries still need to submit their responseplans, the overall impact estimate is likely to increase.

Earthquakes

CropWatch pays relatively little attention to earthquakesand volcanic eruptions as their agricultural impacts are normally limited, exceptwhere they involve the destruction of infrastructure such as roads andirrigation canals. A number of minor earthquakes were recorded during thereporting period, including in Austria, Israel, Russia, Japan, Morocco,Indonesia, Chile, and Turkey, as well as continuing aftershocks in Nepal, oneyear after the Ghorka earthquake, which was last year’s worst earthquake interms of casualties.

Several recent earthquakes with Richter scale magnitudes (M)above 6 are worth mentioning, especially the 6 February M 6.4 earthquake inTaiwan where about 120 people died. An M 6.7 earthquake rocked Manipur on 8January, killing 11 and injuring about 200 in India and Bangladesh and creatingpanic as far as Myanmar and China (Tibet), Bhutan, and eastern Nepal. The mostserious earthquake (M 7.8) occurred on 16 April in northern Ecuador. Local sources report just short of 700 deaths, more than fifteen thousand injuredpeople, and more than 200,000 affected through destruction of infrastructure,houses, and schools, especially in Esmeraldas and Manabí provinces. The UN and other humanitarian organizations have issued an international appeal foremergency assistance of US$72.7 million.

Cold weather

Bad winter conditions have affected eastern Asia and theUnited States. At the end of January (25 January), 85 people were killed inKaohsiung, Taiwan, and crops suffered minor damage (US$300,000). On the sameday in Japan snow fell as far south as Nagasaki and Kagoshima Prefectures. Allocations (especially Taiwan) normally enjoy a warm temperate climate, and winterconditions are rarely severe. In the United states, winter storms Jonas (24January) and Juno caused floods and claimed about 20 lives in North Carolina,Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. A state of emergency was declaredin Delaware, Georgia,

Kentucky, Maryland (which observed a snow record with morethan 70 centimeters of precipitation), New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia,Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia, as well as neighboring areas.

Storms and cyclones

As mentioned above, two record cyclones occurred during thereporting period. Considering their strength, they created relatively limiteddamage due to their trajectories avoiding high vulnerability areas.

Cyclone Winston was active between 7 February and 3 March.It formed east of Vanuatu and was characterized by a complex track thataffected Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga, Niue, and Queensland, killing about 50 peopleand causing damage for a billion U.S. dollars, the costliest cyclone to date inthe South Pacific. In Fiji, the cyclone made landfall with sustained windsreaching just under 300 km/h, killing 20 people and affecting 350,000, of whichmore than half were in need of shelter; estimated damage reached about US$200million to crops and livestock, and about 20million to forestry and fisheries. In Tonga, reports indicate damage to bananasand the vanilla crop, a major foreign exchange earner. It is stressed that thesame area also suffered drought, so that Winston compounded the difficulties ofthe agricultural sector.

Other cyclones included Amos (late April), in the samegeneral area as Winston, Alex (Azores, January), as well as the strongesttropical cyclone of the southwest Indian Ocean in terms of sustained winds,Fantala, which affected mostly the Seychelles and to some extent northernMadagascar between 11 and 26 April. Compared to Winston, the impact of Fantalawas very limited.

Floods and landslides

Landslides are reported from all continents, resulting fromeither heavy or prolonged rainfall, such as for example in the wake of cycloneAmos in Samoa. The most dramatic floods are those that affected Pakistan and neighboringareas in Iran and Afghanistan in March and April, killing more than 200 people,especially in the North-western Tribal Belt and in Baluchistan, but alsoaffecting Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Punjab. The impact was worst inKhyber Pakhtunkhwa province (Peshawar).

Other Asian floods include those that occurred in North EastIndia (Arunachal Pradesh at the end of April) and mid-March in BandungDistrict, West Java Province, in Indonesia.

In South America, Brazil suffered from landslides andflooding in São Paulo, among other areas, in mid-March as a result of torrentialrainfall, burying people and causing some to drown. In North America, in thestate of Texas, floods caused about US$5 billion in damage.

Finally, a severe storm caused havoc in Uganda at thebeginning of April, killing thirty and destroying houses in Buliisa District.Excess water in early March hit both north-east Ghana (Yendi) and Angola(Lubango in Huíla province), where flooding of the Capitão river destroyed abridge.

Drought

Drought was the most serious disaster in terms ofagricultural impacts during the reporting period. Initial analyses in previousCropWatch bulletins reported about the South American drought corridor, wherethe shortage of water supply appeared clearly in the CropWatch RAIN indicators(e.g., figures 1.1 and 3.1 in the November 2015 CropWatch bulletin). Situationsof concern are mostly reported from Guatemala and neighboring El Salvador whereabout 1.5 million people are affected by the drought, which especially harmedmaize crops, with about 1 million people needing food assistance. In terms ofseverity and numbers affected, however the brunt of the impact has now moved toAsia and Africa.

In Asia and the Pacific, for obvious reasons of lessdiversified crop growing conditions, some small countries are seriously affected,for instance Timor Leste, Fiji and Palau, as well as Papua new Guinea. Some of them(Fiji and Timor) will now enter their dry season, which will worsen watershortages for a large share of the population (about one third) alreadyaffected by crop failures. Papua New-Guinea mostly enjoys year-round humidequatorial conditions and diverse conditions brought about by topography,except in the south-west where rainfall will decline from now and where morethan one million people are currently impacted by drought.

Among the large and populated countries, drought is mostlyreported from Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and India. InIndonesia, where ACAPS ranks the impact as “low,” both planting of the previousand the current crops was delayed, which resulted in about 1 million peoplerequiring food assistance. In the Philippines, about 3.5 million peoplesuffered from a moderate-impact drought that affected almost half of the country,most seriously in south Mindanao. Rice prices in March remained just below lastyear’s, which is generally attributed to the government’s policy ofpreventively increasing rice stocks. In Thailand, about one fifth of provincessuffered drought and water use was restricted for domestic and agriculturaluse. In Vietnam, about a third of the provinces suffered from water shortage,mostly in the southern-central areas, including the Mekong delta, the main riceproducing area. Drought and the resulting salt-water intrusion affected thetiming and rate of planting in about half a million hectares. Both Vietnam andThailand are major exporters of rice and other agricultural commodities, andthe availability of rice and maize may be affected. In India, national sourcesinform that nearly a quarter of the population was affected to varying degreesby drought and by heat-waves, some areas for the second year in a row. Waterreserves are low.

In Africa, drought affects two areas: the Horn of Africa andthe south of the continent. No major alarm is raised about northern Mozambique,Tanzania, and crop-growing areas in Kenya, which lie between the two mentioneddisaster areas.

In Ethiopia, more than 10 million people are currentlyfacing or are at risk of being exposed to serious food shortages due to theworst drought in several decades. The resulting loss of more than half of 2015 Mehercrops (the main growing season harvested after August, mostly in the center ofthe country) results in a cost of close to US$1.5 billion, according to theWorld Food Programme. The emergency is not planned to dissipate before the endof September, particularly in some of the poorest parts of the country wherelivestock plays a central part in the economy.

In southern Africa, importantly, while food shortages areone of the most dramatic impacts of the ongoing drought, the current crisis insouthern Africa—probably the worst since the 1981/82 El Niño—has wide-rangingand certainly long-lasting impacts beyond nutrition and agriculture. Foodprices have risen and low water levels in dams (notably Kariba on the borderbetween Zimbabwe and Zambia) has led to shortages of electricity, shortage ofdrinking water, a general slow-down of the economy, and loss of income,including in the mining sector where workers had to be laid-off. InSouth-Africa, many small farmers are going out of business.

Drought prevails in many areas in the region (more than halfthe provinces in South-Africa, and 80 percent of the districts in Malawi). InZimbabwe and Swaziland, every fourth person is directly affected. Severemalnutrition is reported from all countries, including Madagascar.

[1]The number of casualties is 5 to 10 percent of those due to man-madedisasters (e.g., war) over the same period.

[2]Madden-Julian Oscillations (MJOs), first described at the beginningof the 1970s, are large east-moving circulation cells over tropical oceans.They circle the earth and return to their original position over one to twomonths.