China must step up efforts to minimise flood damage

IT is a little known fact among the public and politicians that floods cause more damages each year globally than any other form of natural disasters. According to the United Nations, over the 20-year period between 1995 and 2015, 157,000 people died in floods and another 2.3 billion were affected.

Currently, global average annual flood losses are estimated at US$104 billion. The country incurring the highest losses is China, followed by the US and India. These losses do not include disruptions to global supply chains when industries located in flood plains are often affected by high waters. The 2011 flood in Thailand first brought this problem to global attention. However, the country which has the potential to disrupt the global supply chains the most because of floods is China, followed by Brazil, Russia and India.

Because of topography, high population, urbanisation and tremendous economic growth during the past decades, China has had three of the ten most costly global floods since 1950. Equally, because of population density, all the three Chinese floods resulted in high fatalities compared to the other seven floods elsewhere where deaths were in the hundreds.