It was caused partly by the loss of up to 80 per cent of trees in the river basin. Two million people in Bangladesh had their homes flooded in 1999 as a result of deforestation in the Himalayas. The health of 70 million may have been affected by the forest fires in Indonesia in 1997 which cast a pall of smoke over six South East Asian countries. Three million hectares of Brazil's forests in Roraima burnt in the same year. A similar area of forest was alight in Mongolia in 1996.
Experts blame the fires on drought, deforestation and land clearance.
Around 80 per cent of deaths from earthquakes are caused by collapsing buildings. Most of the 100,000 who died in the 1988 Armenian quake lived in cheap, concrete, buildings. Ethiopia's highlands, which have supported agriculture for millennia, have lost 90 per cent of their trees since 1990 making it hard to grow crops. An estimated 135 million people are in danger of becoming environmental refugees in Mali and Burkina Faso. Desertification as a result of deforestation and land clearance has forced an estimated one in six to leave the land.