Dramatic rise in climate disaster over last twenty years: UN report

Extreme weather events and other disasters over the past 20 years have become more common and more costly, pushing millions of people toward “an uninhabitable hell.” according to a UN report published yesterday.

In the period 2000 to 2019, there were 7,348 major recorded disaster events claiming 1.23 million lives, affecting 4.2 billion people (many on more than one occasion) resulting in approximately US$2.97 trillion in global economic losses, the “Human Cost of Disasters” report said.

According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation reports , disasters caused by extreme weather events over the past 20 years almost doubled to 6,681 from the 3,656 that occurred between 1980 and 1999.

The UN Secretary-General’s special representative for disaster risk deduction and co-author Mami Mizutori said that leaders must invest in prevention, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction.

“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,” the report added.

Courtesy: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health