Extreme weather events have caused losses of almost US$4.3 billion in the Global economy in the last fifty years, according to data updated today by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The Geneva-based body reported that the 11,788 climatic and hydrological disasters that have occurred in the last half century have caused the deaths of at least two million people worldwide.
“Unfortunately, the most vulnerable communities bear the brunt of weather hazards”, WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas lamented in a press release.
According to data from this organization – which is the spokesperson for the United Nations on weather, climate and water – 90% of these deaths occurred in developing countries.
However, more than 60% of the economic losses recorded – and largely covered by insurance – affected the most developed economies on the planet, especially the United States, which lost 1.7 billion euros due to climate disasters in the last half a century.
However, for the countries with the strongest economies, almost no single catastrophe caused economic losses of more than 0.1% of their GDP.
By continents, Asia is the one that has suffered the highest number of deaths associated with extreme weather events, with 984,263 deaths (47% of the total) in the period analyzed.
Most of the time, those deaths were caused by tropical cyclones, such as Cyclone Nargis that killed more than 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 2008.
In Africa, disasters killed 733,585 people, in Europe they caused 166,492 deaths, mostly from extreme temperatures, and in North and Central America and the Caribbean they caused 77,454 deaths.
In the Southwest Pacific the death toll from 1970 to 2021 rose to 66,951 people. The ranking by continents was closed by South America, where 58,484 people died in 943 disasters, mostly river floods.
Despite these data, the WMO acknowledges that the number of deaths recorded from meteorological disasters has been declining remarkably decade after decade, and attributes these data to the improvement of early warning protocols.
Source: EFE
Source: Gestion
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