Climate disasters have caused losses of more than 4 billion euros in the last 50 years.
Extreme weather events have caused losses of nearly $4.3 billion in the global economy. over the past fifty years, according to data updated Monday by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The Geneva-based agency reported that the. 11,788 climate and hydrological disasters. over the last half-century have caused the deaths of at least two million people worldwide.
“Unfortunately, the most vulnerable communities bear the brunt share of weather hazards,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas lamented in a press release.
According to data from this organization – which is the UN’s mouthpiece on weather, climate and water, 90% of these deaths occurred in developing countries.
However, more than 60 % of the economic losses accounted for – and largely covered by insurance – affected the most developed economies on the planet, especially in The United States, which lost 1.7 billion euros. due to climate disasters in the last half century.
However, for the countries with the strongest economies almost no single catastrophe alone accounted for economic losses of more than 0.1 % of their GDP.
By continents, Asia 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, these deaths were caused by tropical cyclones.such as Cyclone Nargis, which killed more than 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 2008.
At Africa, disasters killed 733,585 people.In Europe they caused 166,492 deaths, mostly due to 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 The ranking by continent was closed by South America.where 58,484 people died and more than 115.2 billion dollars were lost in 943 disasters, mostly river floods.
Despite these data, the WMO acknowledges that the number of deaths recorded by meteorological disasters has been decreasing remarkably decade after decade, and attributes this data to improved early warning protocols.
