India (288 disasters), the Philippines (274), and Indonesia (163) round out the list of the top 5.
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The biggest victim is the United States when it comes to the number of weather-related disasters, but more people have died in China and India due to flooding that has killed many and destroyed homes and property of many more.
The report, however, said in recent years, national preparedness and more efficient responses to disasters have significantly reduced the numbers of people dying from weather-related hazards in some countries.
The new United Nations report highlights weather-disaster relation while offering a perspective on the incidence of each.
The ferocity and frequency of weather-related disasters across the world are now greater than ever before.
The rest come from phenomenons such as floods, heat waves, storms, extreme cold and droughts. according to a report issued by the The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR).
“Asia accounts for the lion’s share of disaster impacts, including 332,000 deaths and 3.7 billion people affected”.
“Population growth will continue to put more and more people in harm’s way while uncontrolled building on flood plains and storm-prone coastal zones will increase human vulnerabilities to extreme weather events”, the report noted.
With reference to the rising ocean temperatures and melting glaciers as drivers of extreme weather, Wahlstrom suggested that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would help reduce the massive damage and losses inflicted by climate-influenced disasters.
According to statistics, half of the weather disasters where actually floods and they affected about 2.3 billion people, with a majority from Asia.
Nevertheless, researchers acknowledged that they weren’t able to calculate how many of those events were directly associated with climate change.
Droughts affected over a billion people over the past 20 years, causing hunger, malnutrition, disease, and agricultural failure, the report stated. The report estimates about 4.1 billion were wounded in addition to the deaths, and the economic costs amounted to $1.9 trillion over that time period. The center’s Emergency Events Database contains the world’s most complete record of disasters from 1900 to the present, it said.
The worst disaster to hit Asia was Cyclone Nargis, which struck Myanmar in 2008, leaving at least 138,000 dead. Earlier this month, President Xi Jinping reassured his French counterpart François Hollande of China’s commitment to dealing with climate change.In June, China submitted an aggressive plan to the United Nations, vowing to slash greenhouse gas emissions per unit of gross domestic product by 60-65% from 2005 levels by around 2030. “On the other hand, storms were the deadliest type of natural disasters, accounting for 242,000 deaths, or 40 percent of the global weather-related deaths with 89 percent of these deaths occurring in lower-income countries”, the report said.
And unfortunately, the toll of deaths, homelessness and economic damage from weather-related disasters also is on a trajectory to increase.
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That’s a huge price to pay for ignoring climate change.
