"It's time to change the mind-set that natural disasters are inevitable," said Gordon McBean, author of a recent report by the council on natural disaster prevention.

"We can't actually stop hurricanes or tsunamis or other extremes of nature. But ... we can avoid a lot of unnecessary human and economic losses," said McBean, policy chair of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction at the University of Western Ontario.

The rise in natural disasters results mainly from increasingly volatile global weather patterns and growing human populations in exposed areas such as coastlines.

Natural disasters are defined as events that outstrip the capacities of local communities to cope. While earthquakes and tsunamis have caused huge damage, the worst losses were caused by extreme atmospheric events and weather-related hazards such as storms, floods, landslides and wildfires, McBean said.

Scientists must integrate research in engineering, climate, health, and the social sciences and "find a better way to plug these insights into the policymaking process," McBean said.

Governments exacerbate damage from natural disasters, he said, by removing mangrove swamps that protect vulnerable coastlines, ignoring risks from volcanoes, earthquakes, floods landslides and wildfires, making poor use of satellite data and networked early warning systems, and favouring financial incentives that sacrifice sustainability for short-term gain.

"We have an opportunity right now right after disasters while governments are more receptive to influence policy from the start," McBean said by phone from the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, where the group is holding its general assembly.

The data on disasters, compiled by the Brussels-based Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, doesn't give monetary figures for damage. However, the insurance industry estimates natural disasters caused $140 billion US in economic losses last year, second only to the record $179 billion US reported in 1995.

With a slew of recent disasters including last December's Asian tsunami, hurricane Katrina in the United States and this month's India-Pakistan earthquake, the numbers for this year are likely to be even worse, McBean said.

This is cache, read story here