The disaster in the Philippines was unbelievably devastating, but it comes as no surprise. The moral of the story is, billions of people live along coasts and other bodies of water, where so many types of natural disasters occur (see Katrina, 2004 Tsunami, countless other floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, and typhoons). More and more people continue to move to coasts despite the inherent risk of living near pretty much any body of water. This type of migration will expose 2.75 billion people [by 2025] to coastal threats from global warming such as sea level rise and stronger hurricanes in addition to other natural disasters like tsunamis. Yes, living near water is great, but we are playing with fire by doing so. I just hope that humanity eventually learns from all this unimaginable death and destruction and we take steps to encourage people to move people further inland and make those that want to stay near the coast far safer. livescience/4167-flocking-coast-world-population-migrating-danger.html
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 22:46:17 +0000