The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has warned that climate change will bring more and more intense natural disasters with it. These disasters hit the global south particularly hard. This is what the WMO describes together with the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain (Belgium) in a report that the organization presented in Geneva on Wednesday. It lists more than 11,000 climate-related natural disasters from the past 50 years. More than two million people were killed. The economic damage amounted to more than $ 3.6 trillion. For the report, the WMO evaluated data on storms, floods, droughts or extreme heat events and forest fires.
The number of climate-related natural disasters has been rising steadily since 1970 - between 2000 and 2009 there were five times as many as in the 1970s. That number has decreased slightly over the past decade. The death toll has been falling steadily since the 1970s. This is mainly attributed to the early warning systems, which are constantly being improved. In poorer countries in particular, however, there are still gaps in the recording of the weather - of all countries, where most natural disasters are recorded.
More than 70 percent of climate-related events struck the global south, almost a third hit the poorer countries in Asia, and 15 percent occurred in Africa. Since the countries are often suddenly hit by the disasters, the death rate is particularly high. 91 percent of the world's deaths from natural disasters were therefore attributable to countries in the global south - almost half to Asia and more than a third to Africa.
A contrary picture emerges in the countries of the global north.
There were fewer disasters and fewer fatalities, but almost 60 percent of the economic losses were attributable to these countries.
This is mainly due to storms in the United States.
The most expensive natural disaster was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which cost the US more than 146 billion dollars.
Three more storms followed, all of which struck the United States in 2017: Harvey, Maria, and Irma.
The most common are floods and storms
How much damage a disaster causes has to do not only with the region in which it takes place, but also with the type of event. The natural disasters with the most deaths are droughts and storms. In Africa, for example, 95 percent of the disaster victims died as a result of drought. The disaster that claimed the most deaths in the past 50 years was the drought in Ethiopia in 1983, in which around 300,000 people were killed. The most costly disasters are storms and floods. The most common weather-related natural disasters are global floods and storms.
In Europe, around 80 percent of the total number of fatalities from natural disasters since 1970 were killed in the 2003 and 2010 heat waves. The 2003 heat wave resulted in almost 10,000 fatalities in Germany alone. The most common disasters in this country up to 2014 were floods, storms and heat waves.