Cape Times

Losses from climate disasters soar

Direct costs from all such incidents over the past 20 years amounted to $2.9 trillion

- MICHAEL TAYLOR

ECONOMIC losses caused by climate-related disasters have soared by about two-and-a-half times in the past 20 years, the UN said yesterday.

From 1998 to 2017, direct losses from all disasters totalled $2.9 trillion (R42trln), of which 77 percent was due to extreme weather that is intensifyi­ng as the world warms, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) said in a report.

That compares with overall losses of $1.3trln from 1978 to 1997, 68 percent of that accounted for by climate and weather hazards, including storms, floods and droughts.

“We can see that climate change is playing an increasing­ly important role in driving up disaster losses around the world, and that probably will be the case in the future as well,” said Ricardo Mena, an official at the Geneva-based UNISDR.

On Monday, climate scientists warned that if global average temperatur­es rise more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial times, it would lead to more suffering – especially among the world’s poorest.

The planet has already heated up by about 1°C.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather, and disasters will continue to set back sustainabl­e developmen­t, the UNISDR report warned.

Climate-related disasters accounted for about 90 percent of the 7 255 major disasters between 1998 and 2017, most of them floods and storms, it said.

Losses were greatest in the US at $945 billion, followed by China at $492bn and Japan at $376bn.

In the past two decades, 1.3 million people were killed and 4.4 billion were injured, left homeless, displaced or required emergency help.

More than half the deaths were caused by 563 earthquake­s and related tsunamis, said the report drawing on data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiolo­gy of Disasters in Belgium.

Although rich countries shoulder the highest absolute economic losses, the report noted the disproport­ionate impact of disasters on low and middle-income countries.

People in poorer nations are seven times more likely to be killed by a disaster than in wealthier ones, Mena told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In developing countries, economic losses are not analysed for many disasters, meaning the new data was just the “tip of the iceberg”, he noted.

Puerto Rico was the only high-income territory ranked among the top 10 places for annual losses as a percentage of economic growth, alongside Haiti, Honduras, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Georgia, Mongolia, Tajikistan and North Korea.

Mami Mizutori, UN special representa­tive for disaster risk reduction, called for greater efforts to tackle high fatalities in earthquake-prone regions.

The 2 000 deaths and widespread destructio­n caused by last month’s earthquake and tsunami on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island exposed the need to apply high standards for constructi­on in seismic zones, she added.

The report ramped up the urgency for countries to put into practice a global plan for managing disaster risk hammered out in 2015 in Sendai, Japan, UNISDR’s Mena said.

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