U.N.: Extreme weather killed 600,000, cost trillions

The average of 335 disasters every year during the past two decades is double the level of 10 years before.

GENEVA — Weatherrelated disasters in the past two decades have killed more than 600,000 people and inflicted economic losses estimated at trillions of dollars, the United Nations said on Monday, warning that the frequency and impact of such events was set to rise.

The figures were released before a U.N.backed climate meeting, starting next Monday in Paris, at which more than 120 national leaders will try to rein in greenhousegas emissions and slow rising global temperatures.

According to the report from the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the United States suffered the highest number of weather-related disasters in the past two decades, but China and India have endured floods that affected billions of people.

As well as killing hundreds of thousands, weather-related disasters wounded 4.1 billion others and inflicted economic costs well in excess of $1.9 trillion during the two decades, the report found.

The U.N. office recorded an average of 335 weatherrelated disasters every year during the two decades, double the level in the previous 10 years. The report counted events that had killed 10 or more people, affected more than 1,000 and generated appeals for assistance.

“Predictions of more extreme weather in the future almost certainly means that we will witness a continued upward trend in weather-related disasters in the decades ahead,” the report said.

In a foreword to the findings, Margareta Wahlstrom, the head of the disaster-reduction office, said the findings “underline why it is so important that a new climate-change agreement emerges” from the meeting in Paris.

Citing the rising temperature of the oceans and melting glaciers as two central drivers of extreme weather, Wahlstrom said that agreement on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions would help reduce the huge damage and losses inflicted by disasters linked to climate.

There is strong evidence that the warming climate is creating more frequent and intense heat waves, causing heavier rainstorms, worsening coastal flooding and intensifying some droughts, but for many other types of weather occurrences, the linkage is less clear.

Floods accounted for close to half of all the disasters, affecting 2.3 billion people, mostly in Asia, the report found. Storms took the heaviest toll in lives, however, causing about 242,000 deaths, including 138,000 killed by Cyclone Nargis, which hit Myanmar in 2008.

Droughts, most acute in Africa, had affected more than 1 billion people, leading not only to hunger, malnutrition and disease but also to widespread agricultural failure that resulted in longlasting underdevelopment, the report said.

Heat waves had killed 148,000, mostly in Europe, and wildfires had emerged as another climate-related risk. About 38 major wildfires in the United States were estimated to have affected more than 108,000 people and caused losses of over $11 billion — numbers the report said were sure to rise when fires that were raging after August, the cutoff point for data, were taken into account.

The figure of $1.9 trillion for the worldwide cost of the disasters was drawn up for the United Nations by the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Belgium. The center said that figure was a minimum, however, as data was available for only about a third of the recorded disasters.