More than 90 percent of global disaster-related deaths occur in developing countries, according to a UN report.
Extreme weather has led to the deaths of 2 million people and $4.3 trillion in economic damage over the past half century, a United Nations report found.
According to new figures released Monday by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 11,778 weather-related disasters have occurred between 1970 and 2021, and the number has skyrocketed over that period.
The report found that more than 90 percent of globally reported deaths from these disasters occurred in developing countries.
“The most vulnerable communities are sadly most affected by weather, climate and water-related hazards,” WMO chief Petteri Taalas said in a statement.
Cyclone Mocha, which wreaked havoc in Myanmar and Bangladesh last week, exemplified this reality, Taalas said.
The severe storm “caused widespread devastation, … affecting the poorest of the poor,” he said.
But the WMO also said improved early warning systems and coordinated disaster management had significantly reduced human casualties.
Taalas pointed out that during disasters similar to Mocha in the past, “both Myanmar and Bangladesh have suffered tens and even hundreds of thousands of deaths”. Myanmar’s military government has put the death toll from the latest cyclone at 145, but fears the number could be higher.
In a 2021 report on deaths and losses associated with disasters between 1970 and 2019, the agency had pointed out that at the start of the period, the world was seeing more than 50,000 such deaths annually. By the 2010s, the death toll from disasters had fallen below 20,000 per year.
And in its update to that report, the WMO said on Monday that 22,608 deaths from disasters have been recorded globally in 2020 and 2021 combined.
“Thanks to early warnings and disaster management, these catastrophic death rates are thankfully a thing of the past,” the report said. “Early warnings save lives.”
The UN has launched a plan to ensure that all countries are equipped with disaster early warning systems by the end of 2027. To date, only half of the world’s countries have such systems.
Economic losses
The WMO, meanwhile, warned that while the number of deaths has fallen, economic losses in weather-related disasters have soared.
The agency previously recorded economic losses that increased sevenfold between 1970 and 2019, from $49 million a day during the first decade to $383 million a day in the last decade.
In monetary terms, the wealthy countries are by far the hardest hit.
Developed countries accounted for more than 60 percent of losses from weather, climate and water disasters, but in more than four-fifths of cases, economic losses for each disaster were equivalent to less than 0.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).