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Despite the massive scale of their operations, only in recent years have the people who deliver disaster aid begun to benefit from the kind of data-driven decisionmaking and rigorous academic study that their commercial and military counterparts rely on. In the past decade, the responses to major disasters have been analyzed in hundreds of case studies and pored over by experts, their conclusions field-tested in subsequent crises where yet more data is collected. Learning the right lessons could not be more important: The stakes are literally life and death.
Photo: Q. Sakamaki

After the earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince, inhabitants scavenged what supplies they could from the rubble.
Photo: Q. Sakamaki

Today, more people than ever are vulnerable to natural disasters. Population growth and environmental degradation mean that the average number of people requiring help each year after storms, droughts, epidemics, and other natural catastrophes has skyrocketed in recent decades. More than a billion people now live within 62 miles of an ocean; an estimated 10 million are hit by floods every year. Thanks to global climate change, that number is expected to quintuple by 2080.

Earthquakes are an even more lethal threat, particularly in poor countries. Port-au-Prince and its environs collapsed because of the shoddy construction that is the norm in developing-world megalopolises from Mexico City to Chengdu. Haiti’s 7.0 temblor ranks among the deadliest ever recorded, on par with the quake-induced tsunami that struck Indian Ocean shorelines in 2004. Indeed, in the past 40 years, earthquakes and the tsunamis they spawn have killed more people than any other kind of natural disaster.

Aid agencies have ramped up apace. The number of emergency humanitarian workers worldwide has grown at a rate of 6 percent for the past 10 years, reaching a total of more than 210,000. In 2008, government and private donors gave $6.6 billion to international response efforts, nearly triple the 2000 total. It seems to be helping: Since 197

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PLAAF flies to Libya, but all the Chinese have been evacuated

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"The "Burma" Truck
Chrysler Export Corporation
China Service Contract DA-TPS-83306


Ther Dodge Division of Chrysler Corporation produced these trucks during the Second World War for the Chinese Army's use on the Burma and Ledo Roads. "

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In their new book, The Big Ditch, Harvard Business School professor Noel Maurer and economic historian Carlos Yu discuss the complicated history of the Panama Canal and its remarkable turnaround after Panama took control in 1999. Q&A with Maurer, plus book excerpt

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After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again. "

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