Washington : Climate change is largely to blame for a near doubling of natural disasters in the past 20
years, the United Nations said here.
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said 7,348 major disaster events had occurred between
2000 and 2019, claiming 1.23 lives, affecting 4.2 billion people and costing the global economy some
$2.97 trillion.
The figure far outstrips the 4,212 major natural disasters recorded between 1980 and 1999, the UN
office said in a new report entitled “The Human Cost of Disasters 2000-2019”.
The sharp increase was largely attributable to a rise in climate-related disasters, including extreme
weather events like floods, drought and storms, the report said.
Extreme heat is proving especially deadly.
“We are wilfully destructive,” UNDRR chief Mami Mizutori told reporters in a virtual briefing. “That is the
only conclusion one can come to when reviewing disaster events over the last 20 years.”
She accused governments of not doing enough to prevent climate hazards and called for better
preparation for looming disasters.
“The odds are being stacked against us when we fail to act on science and early warnings to invest in
prevention, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction,” she said.
The report did not touch on biological hazards and disease-related disasters like the coronavirus
pandemic, which has killed over one million people and infected over 37 million in the past nine months.
But Mizutori suggested coronavirus was “the latest proof that political and business leaders are yet to
tune in to the world around them”.
Monday’s report showed 6,681 climate-linked events had been recorded since the turn of the century,
up from 3,656 during the previous 20-year-period.
While major floods had more than doubled to 3,254, there had been 2,034 major storms up from 1,457
in the prior period.
Mizutori said public health authorities and rescue workers were “fighting an uphill battle against an ever-
rising tide of extreme weather events”.
While better preparedness and early warning systems had helped bring down the number of deaths in
many natural disaster settings, she warned that “more people are being affected by the expanding climate
emergency”.
Monday’s report relied on statistics from the Emergency Events Database, which records all disasters
that kill 10 or more people, affect 100 or more people or result in a state of emergency declaration.
The data showed that Asia has suffered the highest number of disasters in the past 20 years with 3,068
such events, followed by the Americas with 1,756 and Africa with 1,192.
In terms of affected countries, China topped the list with 577 events followed by the United States with
467.
While a warming climate appeared to be driving the number and severity of such disasters, there had also
been an increase in geophysical events like earthquakes and tsunamis that are not related to climate but
are particularly deadly.
The deadliest single disaster in the past 20 years was the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with 226,400
deaths, followed by the Haiti earthquake in 2010, which claimed some 222,000 lives.
