With the steady drumbeat of appeals for disaster relief this year, topped this month by the Pakistan earthquake and Hurricane Wilma, officials at many local charities are afraid they'll suffer a sharp drop in critical holiday season donations.

		Number of natural disasters, 1995-2004 The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters defines a natural disaster as one that kills at least 10 people, affects at least 100, and results in a call for international assistance or a declaration of emergency. The large increase in the number of disasters starting in 1999 is primarily due to increased flooding incidents, both because of more storms and cyclones and because of urbanization in the developing world, which paves over land that otherwise would absorb water runoff. • 1995 -- 419 • 1996 -- 401 • 1997 -- 428 • 1998 -- 487 • 1999 -- 614 • 2000 -- 767 • 2001 -- 719 • 2002 -- 784 • 2003 -- 651 • 2004 -- 719 Source: Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, Brussels

But if the economy doesn't slump, experts say, any falloff in charitable giving probably will be small and temporary.

"Assuming the economy stays strong," said Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, "I think even though it's going to be more competitive and more difficult to raise money this year, it will be possible to do that. Charities may just have to be more aggressive than they would be otherwise."

Some experts were even more sanguine.

"Everybody always worries that when there's a disaster, nobody is going to give money to the humane society or organizations like that, but we're just not seeing that," said John Hartman, vice president for client services at Kintera Inc., a major online charitable donations company.

Mr. Hartman, whose firm provides online services to such clients as UNICEF, Heifer International and Doctors Without Borders, said so-called donor fatigue "is a little bit of a myth."

"People who are philanthropically minded are not giving less, and frankly they're driven more by the economy than by how many disasters have occurred."

Patrick Rooney, director of research for the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, said his center's research backs up Mr. Hartman's conclusions.

"For the most part," Dr. Rooney said, "there is little or no displacement of regular giving by disaster-relief giving. It would be unfair to say that disasters have no impact whatsoever. At the same time, the best evidence we can find is that if there is an effect, it is short-lived and fairly minor."

Dr. Rooney cited the research his center did after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Several hundred senior fund-raisers were asked if the outpouring of donations after Sept. 11, 2001, had affected contributions to their charities. Initially, about 60 percent predicted some negative impact. Six months later, only about half said it had any impact, and that the impact was fairly minor. A year later, only 13 percent felt 9/11 giving was still affecting them.

The center also surveyed individual donors and found that three-quarters of them gave less than $100 to Sept. 11 relief. "We think that's prima facie evidence that people were not reallocating their giving" from their regular charitable causes.

At $2.7 billion in U.S. donations, the 9/11 crisis far outweighed even the major giving that followed last year's South Asian tsunami ($1.56 billion) and this year's combination of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ($2 billion and counting).

Small groups most vulnerable

Ms. Palmer of the Council of Philanthropy speculated that the charities that will be most susceptible to any drop-off from disaster giving will be small organizations "that are so fragile that all it takes is canceling their fall walk for them to fall apart."

Groups that raise money for the arts, the environment and causes further removed from social services also could suffer, Ms. Palmer said.

If disaster donations generally do not drain money from regular charitable giving, though, they can compete with each other. The timing and type of a disaster, the number of people who die and even where it occurs all can affect contributions, several aid officials said.

Among recent natural disasters, the tsunami was unique, they agreed.

Not only did it kill the greatest number of people -- nearly 225,000 -- but it also was unlike the disasters people were used to seeing, and it was dramatized by amateur videos taken by tourists of the huge waves rushing ashore.

"Unfortunately," said Carolyn Miles, chief operating officer of Save the Children, "we've seen lots of hurricanes and earthquakes. But the tsunami was unusual, and the video coverage made it like you were right there when it happened."

There have been plenty of other disasters clamoring for people's attention since then. In fact, the aid group Oxfam International released a chart last week showing that the number of natural disasters in the first half of this decade was 55 percent higher than in the last half of the '90s.

Most aid officials said the overwhelming factor in how much people will donate to a disaster is the amount of publicity it gets, which in turn is related to the type of disaster and where it occurs.

That was easy to see in comparing three disasters this year -- Hurricane Katrina, the Pakistan earthquake and the Central American mudslides spawned by Hurricane Stan.

At World Vision, a Christian charity that has a major distribution center in Sewickley, the total contributions as of this week were $6.1 million for Hurricane Katrina, $1.55 million for the Pakistan quake and just $80,000 for Hurricane Stan.

Home trumps away

While most aid officials said Americans were willing to give to disasters no matter where they strike, they agreed that disasters inside the United States understandably generate a bigger response.

And because Hurricane Katrina involved the evacuation of a major American city and weeks of publicity about its impact on some of the nation's poorest citizens, "Americans were seeing for the first time the kind of images they were used to seeing in disasters in other parts of the world," said World Vision spokeswoman Amy Parodi.

The Pakistan quake has not drawn as many donations, not only because it is outside the United States, but also because its remote location has generated fewer gripping television images. Nevertheless, it has stimulated far more giving than the Central American mudslides, which were all but lost in the blizzard of reporting on the American hurricanes.

The disasters that suffer the most in garnering either individual or government donations are what relief officials call "slow onset" crises, many of which occur in Africa. They cite such complicated, long-developing catastrophes as the hunger crisis in Niger, the years-long conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, and the AIDS pandemic afflicting much of the continent.

Unfortunately, said Ann-Louise Colgan, director of policy analysis for the advocacy group Africa Action, "people are more willing to give when it's a natural disaster than when something seems to be man-made or is more complicated."

"AIDS and hunger are not sexy, they're not timely, they just keep happening and happening," added Ms. Parodi. "And many African countries are just not on the American political landscape.

"I do think there's a sort of perception that Africa's always sick and hungry and dying."

Greg Puley, policy adviser for Oxfam International, said that he recently visited a refugee camp in northern Uganda that had no running water and only two nurses to serve 20,000 people.

The 20-year-old Ugandan conflict, he said, has devastated the northern half of the nation. Rebel groups raid villages and kidnap children to force them to become soldiers. Ugandan government troops cannot protect the villagers and sometimes abuse them by stealing or committing rapes.

Yet Uganda gets relatively little ongoing publicity and little help from wealthy nations or individual donors.

"I think you can speculate that rather than responding purely to humanitarian needs," Mr. Puley said, "governments are also driven by wanting to be seen to be doing the right thing, and they'll be seen as doing the right thing more publicly if they respond to the needs that have the highest media profile."

It is partly for that reason that Oxfam International is pushing wealthy nations to provide $1 billion for an emergency relief fund that would be administered by the United Nations. The fund is likely to be approved by the end of the year, Mr. Puley said, but it is scheduled to get $500 million in initial donations, half of what Oxfam believes it needs to be effective.

Not everyone thinks Africa routinely gets short shrift.

Kintera's Mr. Hartman said many faith-based groups increasingly aim their fund raising at problems in Africa. It's a reminder that in America, most regular charitable giving still occurs through churches, synagogues and mosques.

The latest survey shows that two-thirds of Americans donate to charity each year, giving an average of $1,900, said the Center on Philanthropy's Dr. Rooney. Of those who give, two-thirds make their primary donations through religious organizations.

Many regular givers also dig in to provide extra money when natural disasters occur, he said, donating beyond their usual amounts. That's why he doesn't believe disaster relief really hurts ongoing charity donations.

"There's a lot of concern pointing in that direction," he said, "but there's a lot of evidence pointing in the opposite direction."

Recent natural disasters outside the U.S.
Name	U.S. govt. donations	U.N. world goal	% met by U.S.
Asian tsunami, 2004	$134.1 million	$1.3 billion	10%
Central American mudslides, 2005	$2.2 million	$21.7 million	10%
Pakistan earthquake, 2005	$80.7 million	$271.8 million	30%
Niger famine, 2005	$18.5 million	$81.4 million	23%
Southern Africa famine, 2005	$12.3 million	$87.8 million	14%
Darfur refugees, 2003	$525.3 million	$1.9 billion	28%
Republic of Congo conflict, 1998	$44.7 million	$194.1 million	23%
Source: Oxfam International, United Nations