We do have a sense of that. It's on the basis of that sense of that, the working assumptions we have, that we have decided to make certain investments, which are investments in preparedness, essentially. A working assumption of ours is that these large-scale catastrophic events will increase, that we will not see a diminishing of this. We will see an increase of this for two or three reasons. One is that a lot of disasters are water-related, which is to say hurricanes or cyclones, or the opposite, which is to say drought. Those are climatically affected disasters.
As climate changes there is an impact on the nature of hurricanes and cyclones and so on, that combined with more and more people living in densely populated urban areas. We have gone from being a rural population globally to being an urban population globally, so we see more and more people at risk in highly densely populated and at-risk situations in very poor neighbourhoods in cities. When you get that combination of the event and people living in extreme poverty, that is where you get disaster on a massive scale. We completely expect to see that. We have Haiti this year. We had the Pakistan super-floods, and those are at the mega level. Below that there are several.
For the international federation in any one year somewhere between 40 and 60 emergencies demand an international response. That could be anything from simply some relief goods being shipped, or some people being moved to organize the response. Certainly that is the level at which we're organized. It leads us then to have agreements between national societies in terms of having materials already pre-positioned and having what we call contingency plans with regard to, depending on the scale of the event, who will be called upon to respond, with what materials, and with what people. We have people trained to be the first responders, if you like, as part of the Red Cross system. We invest exactly because we have this sense of what the needs will be. As I said in my earlier remarks, we invest every day in preparedness, in materials being pre-positioned, in people being trained, and testing systems, so when there is a need to respond we know the system works.