Growing urbanisation combined with global warming is causing more and bigger natural disasters, a Red Cross report concludes.

The World Disasters Report 2010, published last week, found that natural disasters in 2009 were "relatively mild". But it warns of an increase in extreme weather conditions in the coming years, posing a growing risk for city dwellers.

For the first time ever, the report notes, more people are living in large cities than in the countryside. There now are an estimated 3.5 billion people living in cities and 3.4 billion people living in the countryside. Nearly 2.6 billion city dwellers are in poor countries, and around one billion of them live illegally in slums, according to the report.

The Red Cross cites Haiti as a scenario many poor countries are likely to face. "Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince is designed to house some 250,000 people but numbered two million residents when the earthquake struck in January, with some 90 percent of them living in slums", says Cees Breederveld, who heads the Dutch Red Cross. "People in slums are much more vulnerable to disasters because of the poor infrastructure, the lack of sanitary facilities and clean drinking water, and their insecure status as slum dwellers."

In case of a disaster the world's poorest cities with over one million inhabitants are facing the same risks as Port-au-Prince, warns Mr Breederveld. "Even without any disasters, child mortality in Kenya, for example, is 16 times higher than in Australia. And urbanisation is still advancing dramatically. Sixty years ago, only 75 cities had more than a million inhabitants. Now there are nearly 450 such cities."

Mr Breederveld concludes that climate change plays an increasingly important role in natural disasters. "The number of catastrophes due to natural causes (earthquakes, storms, volcanic eruptions) or due to epidemics has remained fairly constant. Over the past 15 years, however, there has been a dramatic jump in the number of disasters caused by global warming." Most victims, the Red Cross report notes, are already affected by disasters related to climate change.

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