Hey Al Gore Did You Know? That 90 Percent of Disasters Are Weather-Related , Not Related To Global Warming Family Tree.
UNITED
NATIONS — Ninety percent of disasters in the last 20 years have been
caused by floods, storms, heatwaves and other weather-related events —
and these weather-spawned disasters are becoming more frequent,
according to a report released Monday.
The
report said the 6,457 weather-related disasters that were recorded
between 1995 and 2015 claimed 606,000 lives and affected more than four
billion people.
Flooding
alone accounted for 47 percent of the weather-related disasters,
affecting 2.9 billion people — 95 percent of them living in Asia which
bore the brunt of disasters due mainly to its large and varied landmass
including multiple river basins and flood plains, it said.
In
terms of countries, the United States and China reported the highest
numbers of weather-related disasters during the 20-year period, which
the report said can be attributed to their large landmasses and
population concentrations.
According
to the report, the 10 countries with the most affected people were
China, India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Brazil,
Vietnam, Kenya and Ethiopia.
To
be recorded as a natural disaster in the database, the report said an
event must meet at least one of four criteria: ten or more people
reported killed, 100 or more people reported to be affected, a
declaration of a state of emergency, or a call for international
assistance.
Even
though cyclones, hurricanes and other storms occurred less frequently,
the report said they were the most deadly disasters, killing more than
242,000 people in the last 21 years — 40 percent of the global total.
Nearly
90 percent of these deaths were in low-income countries even though
they accounted for only 26 percent of the storms, it said.
The
report said 164,000 deaths were from extreme temperature, 157,000 from
floods, 22,000 from drought and 20,000 from landslides and wildfires.
The
report, entitled "The Human Cost of Weather-related Disasters
1995-2015," was written by the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction
and the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the
Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. The center's Emergency Events
Database contains the world's most complete record of disasters from
1900 to the present, it said.
The
database recorded an average of 335 weather-related disasters per year
between 2005 and 2014 — a 14 percent increase from 1995-2004 and almost
twice the level recorded during 1985-1994.
"While scientists cannot calculate what percentage of this rise is due to climate change,
predictions of more extreme weather in future almost certainly mean
that we will witness a continued upward trend in weather-related
disasters in the decades ahead," the report said.
Margareta
Wahlstrom, head of the U.N. disaster office, and Debarati Guha-Sapir, a
professor at the Louvain center, said the report's findings "underline
why it is so important that a new climate change agreement emerges" from
a crucial meeting of the world's governments in Paris in December.
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