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PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROL GUZY, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
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By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
There are two competing global trends in how weather disasters—storms, floods, droughts, extreme heat—affect humans. First, climate change is intensifying the weather, increasing the threat. And second, we’re getting better at preparing and protecting ourselves.
What will be the result of that competition over the next half-century, as climate change worsens? We don’t know yet. But we do know what has happened over the last half-century.
The number of deaths caused by weather disasters worldwide has plummeted, not soared.
That’s not really news, but most people probably aren’t aware of it—because journalists like me don’t talk about it enough, and because of the general nimbus of doom that tends to descend on conversations about climate change. (Pictured above, rising floodwaters in northeastern Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria struck in 2017.)
The latest confirmation of the heartening decline in weather deaths, Madeleine Stone writes for us this week, comes from a report by the World Meteorological Organization. From 1970 through 2019, the WMO found, weather disasters claimed more than two million lives worldwide and caused $3.64 trillion in property damage. Financial losses increased, mostly because economic development was putting more property in harm’s way.
But the global death toll from 2010-2019 was just a third of what it was in the 1970s or ’80s—even though the global population had doubled in the interval. A key reason for the decline, the WMO’s Cyrille Honoré said, is the drastic improvement in weather forecasting and early warning systems.
The regional details are interesting. The one region where the death toll shot up in the last half-century was Europe, and climate change was responsible. Of the 159,438 weather-disaster deaths in Europe, according to the WMO, nearly 80 percent were caused by two heat waves in 2003 and 2010—events for which the continent was clearly unprepared. But Europe is rich enough to prepare. When heat records were smashed again in France in 2019, the death toll was a tenth of what it was in 2003.
Developing countries are of course far more vulnerable to weather disasters. They account for more than 90 percent of the two million deaths in the WMO report. Storms are the big threat in Asia, drought in Africa—a single drought killed some 450,000 people in Ethiopia and Sudan in 1983, well over half the total for the whole continent since 1970. Nothing like that event has happened since. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t. There are signs that this year’s drought in East Africa may well get more serious next year.
Climate change has affected the weather felt by 85 percent of the planet’s population, according to a new study. It’s already tipping the scales toward more weather disasters. We need to stop climate change by getting off fossil fuels as fast as possible.
In the meantime, we need to adapt to what’s coming at us. The evidence of the past half-century is that it’s possible.
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