The UN disaster prevention agency said Friday that communities should have been kept away from flood-exposed river banks in Pakistan, as it underlined the human hand in a string of catastrophes. If people had not settled on the river banks, definitely the disaster would have been less, because that is the main cause of the disaster, said Salvano Briceno, director of the UN's International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. The ISDR also pointed to landslides in China, wildfires in Russia and drought in Niger as examples of how communities and towns were increasingly placed or left in harm's way. The vulnerability of human settlements is on the rise and is not yet being addressed by governments or communities, added Briceno.