Number of natural disasters doubles since 2000, with climate change to blame, UN says
The number of natural disasters around the world has doubled since the turn of the century, with to blame according to the . Speaking on Monday, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said 1.23 million people have been killed in natural disasters since 2000. Around the world, 7,348 disasters including earthquakes, tsunamis and droughts have cost nearly $3 trillion, nearly double the numbers for the previous 20-year period. One expert said climate change is turning the world into an 'uninhabitable hell'. Mami Mizutori, the UN Secretary General's special representative for disaster risk deduction, said: 'We are wilfully destructive. That is the only conclusion one can come to. 'COVID-19 is but the latest proof that political and business leaders are yet to tune into the world around them.' China, with 577, and the United States, with 467, recorded the highest number of disaster events from 2000 to 2019, followed by India at 321. Eight of the top 10 countries are in Asia. The number of major floods more than doubled to 3,254. Drought, wildfires and extreme temperature events also wrought havoc. Among the biggest natural disasters in the last 20 years were the Boxing Day tsunami which rocked Indonesia and surrounding countries in 2004, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Debarati Guha-Sapir of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain, Belgium, which provided the statistics for the report, said: 'If this level of growth in extreme weather events continues over the next twenty years, the future of mankind looks very bleak indeed. 'Heatwaves are going to be our biggest challenge in the next 10 years, especially in the poor countries,' she said. Geo-physical events such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes have killed more people than any of the other natural hazards reviewed, the report said. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which took more than a quarter of a million lives, was the deadliest. In a joint foreword to the UN report, Mizutori and Guha-Sapir noted disaster management agencies had nonetheless saved many lives through better preparedness. Countries that have made big strides in evacuating millions of people to safety and cutting death tolls from floods and cyclones include India and Bangladesh. But the odds 'continue to be stacked against them, in particular by industrial nations that are failing miserably on reducing greenhouse gas emissions' in line with an agreed aim of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, they noted. 'Almost all nations' also have not done enough to prevent a wave of death and illness caused by the coronavirus pandemic, despite urgings from experts and UN agencies, they said. 'It is baffling that we willingly and knowingly continue to sow the seeds of our own destruction, despite the science and evidence that we are turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell for millions of people,' they added. Guha-Sapir warned that if extreme weather events continued to grow at the same rate over the next 20 years, 'the future of mankind looks very bleak indeed'. To avoid that happening, the world must act urgently to invest in prevention, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction, Mizutori said. She urged governments to show leadership and deliver on promises made in 2015 under the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, the Sendai Framework to manage disaster risk and the global development goals set to be achieved by 2030. UN member states agreed to put in place national and local strategies to reduce disaster risks by 2020, but so far just over 90 have delivered those, she noted. 'It really is all about governance if we want to deliver this planet from the scourge of poverty, further loss of species and biodiversity, the explosion of urban risk and the worst consequences of global warming,' she said.