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While climate change is making disasters such as cyclones, floods and droughts more intense, more frequent and affecting more places, fewer people are dying from these disasters worldwide due to better warnings, planning and resilience, a senior UN official said.
The world has not really noticed that storms that once claimed tens or hundreds of thousands of lives now claim only a handful, new United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Kamal Kishore, who heads the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, told the Associated Press. But he said much more needs to be done to prevent these disasters from pushing people into abject poverty.
“Fewer people are dying from disasters, and if you look at that as a proportion of the total population, it’s even fewer,” Kishore said in his first interview since taking office in mid-May. “We often take for granted the progress we have made.”
“Twenty years ago, there was no tsunami early warning system except in a small part of the world. Now the whole world is covered by a tsunami warning system,” Kishore said after the 2004 tsunami that killed around 230,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.
People are increasingly better warned about tropical cyclones – also called hurricanes and typhoons – so that the chances of dying in a tropical cyclone in a place like the Philippines are now about a third of what they were 20 years ago, Kishore said.
A former disaster management commissioner for India, Kishore points out that his country has been able to reduce the death toll thanks to better warning systems and better preparedness of the population. For example, hospitals are prepared for a surge in births during a cyclone. In 1999, a super cyclone hit eastern India, killing nearly 10,000 people. In 2013, a storm of similar magnitude hit India, but only killed a few dozen people. Last year, during Kishore’s tenure, Cyclone Biparjoy killed fewer than 10 people.
The same applies to deaths caused by floods, Kishore said.
The data supports Kishore’s thesis, says disaster epidemiologist Debarati Guha-Sapir of the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, who has created a global disaster database. Her database – which she admits is missing parts – shows that global deaths per storm event have fallen from a 10-year average of about 24 in 2008 to a 10-year average of about 8 in 2021. Flood deaths per event have fallen from a 10-year average of nearly 72 to about 31, her data show.
While fewer people are dying from disasters around the world, there are still areas in the poorest countries, especially in Africa, where death rates are increasing or at least staying the same, Guha-Sapir said. It’s similar to public health efforts to eradicate measles. In most places, they’re successful, but in the areas that are least able to cope, there’s no improvement, she said.
India and Bangladesh are role models for better disaster management and preventing deaths, especially from cyclones, Guha-Sapir said. In 1970, more than 300,000 people died in Bangladesh in a cyclone, one of the worst natural disasters of the 20th century, and now “Bangladesh has done a fantastic job of disaster preparedness for years,” she said.
It is important to point out successes, said Guha-Sapir: “We will never get anywhere with gloom and doom.”
Countries like India and Bangladesh have built warning systems, reinforced buildings like hospitals, and know how to prepare for and respond to disasters. But that’s mainly because these countries are becoming richer and more educated and are therefore better able to deal with disasters and protect themselves, says Guha-Sapir. Poorer countries and people cannot do that.
“Fewer people are dying, but that’s not because there is no climate change,” Kishore said. “It’s happening despite climate change. And that’s because we’ve invested in resilience and early warning systems.”
Kishore said climate change is making his job more difficult, but he also said he doesn’t feel like Sisyphus, the mythical man pushing a giant boulder up a mountain.
“There are more frequent dangers and they are greater in new regions,” Kishore said. He said places like Brazil that were once not too worried about flooding are now being devastated. The same goes for extreme heat, which used to be a problem only in certain countries but is now taking on global proportions. He pointed to nearly 60,000 deaths from heatwaves in Europe in 2022.
In India, where temperatures are flirting with the 50 degree Celsius mark, the number of heat-related deaths has been reduced through special regional plans, Kishore said.
“Given the new extreme temperatures we are currently experiencing, every country must redouble its efforts to save lives,” he said. And that means taking a closer look at the built environment of cities, he added.
Reducing deaths is only part of the fight to reduce risks, Kishore said.
“We are more successful in saving lives, but not livelihoods,” Kishore said.
While fewer people are dying, “you see people losing their homes, people losing their businesses, a small farmer running a poultry farm,” Kishore said. If they are hit by a flood or a storm, they may survive, but they have nothing, no seeds, no fishing boats.
“We are not as good as we should be in this regard,” Kishore said. “We cannot accept that there will be losses. Of course there will be losses, but they could be minimized many times over.”