Overview

Environmental disasters occur because of natural or humanmade causes. The latter could be due to the release of pollutants into the environment, either accidentally or because of negligence or insufficient knowledge about the material. A flood that leads to human and material loss because of the building of a dam can also be considered a humanmade environmental disaster. Sometimes it may be difficult to connect a disaster to the cause, but humankind has slowly started realizing that the subsystems in our ecosystem are intricately interconnected and every action can lead to a disaster at a later point in time. Droughts, torrential floods, and other environmental disasters cost the world about $70 billion in 2002 (Reuters, 2002). In the United States, the number of incidents related to leakage or spills of chemicals and oil from pipelines, mobile units, storage tanks, railroads, and fixed manufacturing units increased from 25,700 per year in 1991 to 32,200 per year in 2003 (National Response Center, U.S. Coast Guard; http://www.nrc.uscg.mil/nrchp.html). The present generation, which has benefited from past progress, has also inherited past environmental mistakes. So it is the responsibility of the current generation to ensure that future generations inherit only the benefits of the progress, that they do not inherit any past environmental mistakes, and that the mistakes of the past generations be corrected.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs monitor environmental occurrences (natural and humanmade) around the globe. Several of their reports on...