More than 90 percent of deaths caused by disasters worldwide occur in developing countries, according to a UN report.
Extreme weather has caused the deaths of 2 million people and $4.3 trillion in economic damage over the past half century, according to a United Nations report.
According to new figures released Monday by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 11,778 weather-related disasters have occurred from 1970 to 2021, and have increased over that period.
The report found that more than 90 percent of reported deaths worldwide due to these disasters occurred in developing countries.
“Unfortunately, the most vulnerable communities bear the brunt of weather, climate and water related hazards,” WMO chief Petteri Taalas said in a statement.
cyclone mochathat wreaked havoc in Myanmar and Bangladesh last week exemplifies this reality, Taalas said.
The severe storm “caused widespread devastation…impacting the poorest of the poor,” he said.
But the WMO also said that improved early warning systems and coordinated disaster management had significantly reduced human casualties.
Taalas noted that during Mocha-like disasters in the past, “both Myanmar and Bangladesh suffered the deaths of tens and even hundreds of thousands of people.” Myanmar’s military government has pegged the death toll from the latest cyclone at 145, but fears are that the number is higher.
In a 2021 report covering disaster-related deaths and losses from 1970 to 2019, the agency noted that at the start of the period, the world saw more than 50,000 such deaths each year. By the 2010s, the number of disaster deaths had dropped to less than 20,000 a year.
And in its update to that report, the WMO said on Monday that there were 22,608 disaster deaths worldwide in 2020 and 2021 combined.
“Thanks to early warnings and disaster management, these catastrophic death rates are now, thankfully, history,” the report says. “Early warnings save lives.”
The UN has released a plan to ensure all nations are covered by disaster early warning systems by the end of 2027. To date, only half of the world’s countries have such systems.
Economic losses
Meanwhile, the WMO warned that while deaths have plummeted, economic losses suffered from weather-related disasters have skyrocketed.
The agency previously recorded that economic losses had increased sevenfold from 1970 to 2019, rising from $49 million a day in the first decade to $383 million a day in the last.
Rich countries have been hardest hit by far in monetary terms.
Developed countries accounted for more than 60 percent of the losses due to weather, climate and water disasters, but in more than four-fifths of the cases, the economic losses from each disaster were equivalent to less than 0.1 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).