UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged this upward trend in a speech that marked the end of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in 1999:‘’We know that human communities will always have to face natural hazards, whether floods, droughts, storms or earthquakes. But today’s disasters owe as much to human activities as to the forces of nature. Indeed the term ‘natural’ is an increasingly misleading one. A wide variation in the number and intensity of natural hazards is normal and to be expected. What we have witnessed over the past decades, however, is not nature’s variation but a clear upward trend caused by human activities’’.
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