Given the death toll in Haiti in the hundreds of thousands versus a much smaller number of earthquake deaths in Japan - most deaths in the recent incident appear to have been tsunami-related - Foreign Policy asks just how much you should invest in revising building codes to ensure that buildings are able to resist potential earthquake.
[It]'s probably not money well spent -- at least in the developing world. The cost-effectiveness of these solutions is often unfavorable compared with other interventions designed to save lives in risk-prone countries. ... countries like Haiti [witness] many thousands of deaths from very easily -- and cheaply -- prevented diseases in every month of every year. Choosing one over the other may be unfortunate, but it's hardly irrational. In Istanbul, the cost efficiency of retrofitting public buildings has been estimated at about $2,600 per healthy year of life saved. But in developing countries, millions of people die each year from diseases that can be cured using a simple regime of oral antibiotics, which costs as little as $0.25. More broadly, there are a range of interventions that cost less than $2 per healthy year of life saved in the developing world.
Given the difficulty in predicting when earthquakes are likely to occur, the article reached the conclusion that in the developing world earthquake-resistance wasn't worth focusing much money on. Building such structures appears to be left to the wealthy countries.
There's also a need to ensure that any earthquake-related buildings codes are actually enforced, as adherance to the existing standards in Turkey would have dramatically reduced the number of deaths. Those standards weren't really enforced, and given that construction in such countries seems particularly prone to corruption, creating such building codes without adequate enforcement may cause more problems than are solved.
