JOHANNESBURG, 1 February 2010 (IRIN) - Heavy rains in early 2009 caused one of the worst floods in four decades to hit Namibia, pushing the semi-arid Southern African country into second place in a list of countries most affected by natural disasters last year.

The only other African country on the list, released by the Belgium-based Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), is Zambia, where vast tracts of agricultural land were flooded by the bloated Zambezi River.

The list is based on a scale measuring the impact of the disaster according to the number of people killed and affected per 100,000 inhabitants.*

"Remember that the number of dead in the tsunami [caused by an undersea quake in 2004] in Indonesia was 135,000 or so, and the numbers in Haiti [hit by an earthquake in January 2009] will probably also be that," said CRED director Debarati Guha-Sapir.