UN warns that world risks becoming ‘uninhabitable hell’ for millions unless leaders take climate action

USA There has been a “staggering” rise in natural disasters over the past 20 years and the climate crisis is to blame, the United Nations said Monday.

Researchers pointed to a failure of political and business leaders to take meaningful action to mitigate the impact of climatic change and stop the planet from turning into “an uninhabitable hell for millions of people.” Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 1 million people and infected at least 37 million, has exposed the failure of “almost all nations” to prevent a “wave of death and illness” despite repeated warnings from experts, the report said. Between 2000 and 2019, there were 7,348 major natural disasters including earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes that claimed 1.23 million lives, affected 4.2 billion people and resulted in $2.97 trillion in global economic losses, according to the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). That’s almost double the 4,212 disasters recorded from 19801999, the UN said in its new report The Human Cost of Disasters 20002019. The Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters’ Emergency Events Database characterizes a natural disaster as having at least 10 or more people reported killed, 100 or more people reported affected, declaration of a state of emergency, or a call for international assistance. The vast majority of those disasters were climaterelated, with researchers reporting more flooding, storms, droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes and wildfires in the past 20 years. The sharp increase has been attributed to rising global temperatures, which scientists say is increasing the frequency of extreme weather and disaster events. The report found floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires have all significantly increased in the past 20 years.

“It is baffling that we willingly and knowingly continue to sow the seeds of our own destruction,” said UNDRR chief Mami Mizutori and Debarati GuhaSapir of Belgium’s Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, in a joint foreword to the report. (CNN)