JAKARTA - The estimated cost of reconstruction after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria on February 6, killed more than 50,000 people, more than 100 billion US dollars or around IDR 1,542,350,000,000,000, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
The Turkish government estimates that more than 200,000 buildings were destroyed, along with critical infrastructure in the destruction zone that stretched 500 kilometers.
The new estimate is almost three times that given by the World Bank a week ago, which estimated the cost of reconstruction at US$35 billion.
Louisa Vinton from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said the Turkish government, with support from its organisations, the World Bank and the European Union, had calculated the cost of the damage to be much higher.
"It is clear that the losses alone will amount to more than $100 billion," he said via video link from Gaziantep in Turkey, as reported by The National News March 8.
"Recovery costs will be on top of that," he added.
It is known that as many as 14 million people have been displaced and their livelihoods have been severely disrupted by the earthquake.
Once completed, the estimates will form the basis for a donor recovery and reconstruction conference in Brussels, Belgium next week, he said.
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Recovery costs, including efforts to build better, greener infrastructure, "would obviously outweigh that amount," said Vinton.
UNDP is "deeply disappointed and saddened" by the response to requests for funding to date, he added.
The US$1 billion worth of emergency response requests submitted on February 16 currently account for only 9.6 percent of the total, he said.
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