Secretary of State with the Interior Ministry (MAI) Raed Arafat spoke on Tuesday at the International Catastrophic Risks Forum (ICAR 2016) about the severe effects caused by climate changes and extreme weather phenomena which Romania has been facing over the recent years, underscoring that prevention is currently the best solution.
"Prevention remains the most important solution. If you know that an area is floodable, don't build there. It is the best solution. If we build houses in floodable areas, we must expect to have floodable areas in which these houses will be taken by waters and we might also have loses of human lives," Raed Arafat said.
He added that the entire country has rural floodable areas, where houses have been built and no one took this thing into account.
In the context in which Romania, between 1901 and 2016, registered a 1.96 Celsius degree temperature increase, the Secretary of State mentioned that over the recent decades the drought issue has arisen, alternately with the years of floods and storms, and as such we must think of a fast manner of detecting the problems and alerting the population.
The MAI official pointed out that the population cannot be prepared over night.
Arafat added that warnings for these storms cannot be made, as they come and go very fast, and pointed out that faster alert mechanisms for the population must be found.
According to the World Bank estimations, the natural catastrophes caused by climate changes and extreme weather will affect 1.3 billion people and assets worth 139 thousands of billion euro until 2050.
Financial Supervisory Authority president Misu Negritoiu, Interior Ministry officials and representatives of the insurance companies of Romania and abroad participated on Tuesday in the 13th edition of the International Catastrophic Risks Forum (ICAR 2016).
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