by As climate change makes disasters such as cyclones, floods and droughts more severe, more frequent and more widespread, fewer people are dying from such disasters around the world because of warning, planning and resilience better, said a senior United Nations official.
The world has not really noticed how the storms that killed thousands or hundreds of thousands of people now claim only a handful of lives, said the new Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations Kamal Kishore, who heads the UN office for disaster risk reduction Associated Press. But he said much more must be done to keep these disasters from pushing people into abject poverty.
“There are fewer people dying from disasters and if you look at that as a proportion of the total population, it’s even less,” Kishore said in his first interview since taking office in mid-May. “We often take the progress we’ve made for granted.”
“Twenty years ago there was no tsunami early warning system except in one small part of the world. Now the whole world is covered by a tsunami warning system” after the 2004 tsunami that killed about 230,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, Kishore said.
People are getting better warnings about tropical cyclones – also known as hurricanes and typhoons – so now the chance of dying in a tropical cyclone in a place like the Philippines is about a third of what it was 20 years ago ago, said Kishore.
As India’s former disaster chief, Kishore points to how his country has reduced deaths thanks to better warnings and community preparedness such as hospitals being ready for increased births during a cyclone. In 1999, a supercyclone hit eastern India, killing nearly 10,000 people. Then an almost similar storm hit in 2013, but only a few dozen people were killed. Last year, on Kishore’s watch, Cyclone Biparjoy killed less than 10 people.
The same applies to flood deaths, Kishore said.
The data supports Kishore, said 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 pieces — shows that the number of global deaths per storm has fallen from about a 10-year average of 24 in 2008 to a 10-year average of about 8 in 2021. the number of flood deaths per incident has gone from ten years. the year’s average from nearly 72 to about 31, its data shows.
Although there are fewer deaths worldwide from disasters, there are still pockets in the poorest countries, particularly in Africa, where deaths are getting worse or at least staying the same, Guha-Sapir said. It is similar to public health efforts to eradicate measles, which has been successful in most places, but the areas least able to deal with it are not improving, she said.
India and Bangladesh are poster nations for better dealing with disasters and preventing deaths, especially in cyclones, Guha-Sapir said. In 1970, a cyclone killed more than 300,000 people in Bangladesh in one of the biggest natural disasters of the 20th century and now “Bangladesh has done a great job of reducing disaster risk over the years and years and years,” she said. .
It’s important to point out talents, Guha-Sapir said: “Gloom and doom will get us nowhere.”
Although countries such as India and Bangladesh have created warning systems, strengthened buildings such as hospitals and know what to do to prepare for and then respond to disasters, much of it is as well because these countries are getting richer and better educated and so on. better able to handle disasters and protect themselves, Guha-Sapir said. Poor countries and people cannot.
“Less people are dying, but that’s not because climate change isn’t happening,” Kishore said “That’s despite climate change. And that is because we have invested in resilience, invested in early warning systems.”
Kishore said climate change is making his job more difficult, but he said he doesn’t feel like Sisyphus, the mythical man pushing a giant boulder up a hill.
“You’re getting more severe hazards, more frequent and (in) new geographies,” Kishore said, adding that places like Brazil that weren’t too worried about flooding are now receding. The same applies to extreme heat, which he said used to be an issue only for certain countries, but has now gone global, pointing to almost 60,000 deaths from heat waves in Europe in 2022.
India, where the temperature is flirting with 122 degrees (50 degrees Celsius), reduced heat deaths with specific regional plans, said Kishore.
“However, with the new extreme temperatures we are seeing, every country needs to redouble its efforts to save lives,” he said. And that means looking at the built environment of cities, he said.
Cutting deaths is only part of the battle to reduce risk, Kishore said.
“We are doing a better job of saving lives but not livelihoods,” Kishore said.
Although fewer people are dying “you look at people losing their homes, people losing their businesses, a small farmer running a poultry farm,” Kishore said. When they go under water or get hit by a storm, they might survive but they have nothing, no seeds or fishing boats.
“So we’re not doing as well as we should,” said Kishore. “We cannot assume that losses will occur. Of course they will happen, but they could be minimized by an order of magnitude.”
___
Read more about AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment
___
Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears
______
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage is financially supported by multiple private foundations. AP is responsible for each and every subject. Find AP standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and covered areas of funding at AP.org.
