Mexico

In terms of geography and climate, Mexico is one of the most diverse countries in the world. It is also susceptible to a wide range of natural hazards, including floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, tsunamis, and forest fires. These, combined with high levels of social vulnerability caused by rapid urbanization, poverty, and marginalization in rural areas, create high levels of disaster risk. Mexico's institutional and financial capacity to prepare for and respond to disasters has improved dramatically since the mid-1980s. Today it has a national civil protection system that coordinates the disaster management activities of central government agencies, sub-national governments, the private sector, and civil society, and the government allocates approximately $600 million from the national budget every year to finance disaster relief and reconstruction activities.

Mexico is exposed to a wide range of natural hazards all over the country. The most seismic area is along the Pacific Coast, from Chiapas in the southwest to Nayarit in central Mexico. There are seven volcanoes considered high risk across central Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and down into Chiapas. The Yucatan Peninsula and the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts are affected by hurricanes, and cities all over Mexico from Tijuana in the north to Villahermosa in the southern state of Tabasco are prone to flooding. Large areas of central Mexico are susceptible to rainfall- and earthquake-induced landslides, and the northern states of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Durango all suffer regularly from droughts.

The most destructive natural disasters occurring over the last 20 years include the Mexico City earthquakes of 1985; the eruption of the Chichon volcano in Chiapas in 1982; Hurricane Pauline on the Atlantic Coast in 1997; and more recently, Hurricane Wilma on the Caribbean coast in 2005, and the floods in the State of Tabasco in 2007. The two earthquakes that hit Mexico City on August 19, 1985, the first measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale, claimed the largest number of casualties in Mexican history. An estimated 8,000–10,000 people died, approximately 33,600 dwellings were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless. In terms of economic losses, the earthquakes cost the country over $6 billion in direct and indirect damage, and during the following five years of rehabilitation and reconstruction, the fiscal deficit grew by $ 1.9 billion.

As in other countries, Mexican disasters disproportionately affect the poor. In 2000, the World Bank estimated that in Mexico, some 65 percent of the victims of natural disasters are the poor or very poor. Ninety percent of the 400 people who died in Acapulco due to Hurricane Pauline lived in informal settlements that were leveled by mudslides. Social vulnerability to disaster in Mexico has grown as a result of internal migration, rapid urbanization, deforestation, and other socioeconomic and environmental processes. Marginalized communities suffer particularly from recurrent, low-intensity disasters. A report published by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction Secretariat (2009) found that from 1980 to 2006, the municipalities reporting the highest number of losses in Mexico also had populations with high or very high levels of marginality. Vulnerability to weather-related hazards, for example, is particularly high in the south of Mexico in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Veracruz, where indigenous populations [Page 417]represent a higher proportion of the population than elsewhere in Mexico, and access to basic services is well below the national average.

...