Good news and bad on the damage caused by storms, flooding and drought

WEATHER disasters are striking the world four to five times more often and causing seven times more damage than in the 1970s, the United Nations weather agency has reported.

But the disasters are killing far fewer people, its report found.

In the 1970s and 1980s, weather disasters killed an average of about 170 people a day worldwide, but in the 2010s that dropped to about 40 per day, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said in a report that looks at more than 11,000 weather disasters in the past half a century.

The report comes during a disaster-filled summer globally, with the United States simultaneously struck by powerful Hurricane Ida and an onslaught of drought worsened wildfires.

“The good news is that we have been able to minimise the amount of casualties once we have started having growing amount of disasters: heatwaves, flooding events, drought, and especially ... intense tropical storms like Ida, which has been hitting recently Louisiana and Mississippi,” Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the WMO, told a news conference.

“But the bad news is that the economic losses have been growing very rapidly and this growth is supposed to continue,” he added. “We are going to see more climatic extremes because of climate change, and these negative trends in climate will continue for the coming decades.”

In the 1970s, the world averaged about 711 weather disasters a year but from 2000 to 2009 that was up to 3,536 a year, or nearly 10 a day, according to the report.