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Built-in resilience

Nature Geoscience volume 3, pages 739–740 (2010)Cite this article

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The 2010 Haiti earthquake showed that building codes must be adopted and strictly enforced. Furthermore, timely disaster recovery requires these codes to be supplemented by comprehensive hazard-insurance programmes.

The 2010 Haiti earthquake caused approximately 230,000 deaths1, the fourth largest death toll of any earthquake since 19002. Moreover, this event produced between $US7.5 and 14 billion in damage3 — the lower bound is approximately 120% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Part of the reason the relative impact is so large is that Haiti's GDP is so low. But in comparison with 35 Latin American disasters in the period from 1982 to 19964, Haiti's 120% of GDP still vastly exceeds the economic impact of other disasters in the region, which ranged from 1.0 to 85.4%.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my colleagues on the US Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazards Reduction for their helpful comments. However, none of the conclusions expressed here necessarily reflects views other than those of the author.

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  1. Michael K. Lindell is in the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843-3137, USA. mlindell@tamu.edu,

    Michael K. Lindell

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Lindell, M. Built-in resilience. Nature Geosci 3, 739–740 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo998

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