The number of weather or climate-related natural disasters has increased significantly since the 1970s, as the World Weather Organization WMO reported in Geneva on Wednesday. Over the 50-year period, the number of recorded disasters has quintupled, driven by climate change, more extreme weather, but also improved recording. At the same time, however, the deaths due to such events have fallen to around a third thanks to better warning systems and disaster management.
In total, 11,000 catastrophes were recorded, resulting in more than two million deaths and economic damage of $ 3.64 trillion, according to the WMO Atlas on Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Flood Extremes published Wednesday. While there were only 711 events in total in the 1970s, the number rose to more than 3,500 by the noughties, and in the past decade it fell slightly to just under 3,200.
The trend in deaths is the opposite: while more than half a million people died as a result of the recorded disasters in the 1970s, the number from 2010 to 2019 was only 186,000, according to the WMO atlas.
More than 91 percent of all deaths occurred in developing and emerging countries. The deadliest were droughts, killing 650,000 people since the 1970s, storms killing around 580,000, and flooding killing 60,000. In terms of cost, storms top the list, causing more than half a trillion dollars in total damage. The amount of damage has increased sevenfold since 1970. The three hurricanes alone Harvey, Maria and Irma from 2017 caused US $ 220 billion in damage along with Katrina from 2005, Sandy from 2012 and Andrew by 1992, these US tropical storms were the six most costly catastrophes in the entire reporting period. hurricane Ida, which has just swept the south coast of the United States, could be the costliest such disaster of all time, said WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas. But it is still too early to state the extent of the damage.
Many floods and storms have been recorded in Europe – but the heat was more deadly
1672 disasters were recorded in Europe, killing 159 438 people. Most of them were floods and storms, but with a share of 93 percent, the overwhelming majority of deaths in Europe were from heat waves. In the two hot summers of 2010 in Russia and 2003 in Central and Western Europe, an estimated 130,000 people died, more than 9,000 of them in Germany.
For many of these events, a considerable man-made proportion can now be proven, this applies in particular to heat waves. In the case of droughts, the connection is less clear, as the WMO notes, but the drought of 2016 and 2017 in East Africa was strongly driven by the high temperatures in the western Indian Ocean, to which human influence contributed.
“The number of weather, climate and flood extremes is increasing and they will become even more frequent and violent in many parts of the world as a result of climate change,” said WMO General Secretary Petteri Taalas. But behind the statistics there is also a message of hope: Improved early warning systems have greatly reduced mortality. “We are simply better than ever at saving lives,” Taalas said. However, much remains to be done, the WMO criticizes: only half of the 193 WMO member states have broad-based disaster early warning systems, and there are serious gaps in the network of observation stations, for example in Africa, parts of Latin America and on island states in the Pacific and the Caribbean .
In the report, the WMO recommends, among other things, revising risk assessments in light of climate change, strengthening disaster financing mechanisms and achieving better policies for dealing with slow-onset disasters such as droughts.