New United Nations report highlights weather-disaster relation, offering a wide perspective on the role of weather-related events and recent international developments.
New United Nations report highlights weather-disaster relation, offering a wide perspective on the role of weather-related events and recent international developments.
The United Nations report draws on data spanning the past two decades and has been conducted under the aegis of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. Under increased acknowledgement of climate change the need to mitigate it, the report draws attention that weather-related events are just as disastrous for humankind. Some of these events are increasing in intensity and peridiocity as climate change remains unchecked.
As such, in the timespan between 1995 and 2015, 90 percent of the global disasters were related to droughts or extreme cold, floods, heat waves and storms. On average these weather-related diasters have claimed the lives of approximately 30,000 people yearly. Another 205 million people per year have been displaced and left homeless. Economically, each year the weather-related disasters cost 250 to 300 billion dollars.
Margareta Wahlstorm, the head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction declared in a press release that both climate and weather are the triggers of disaster risk. Overall, the report highlights how these disasters reflect in terms of lives lost worldwide. Economically, weather-related disasters also also looming heavilly over the development of already tried least developed countries. These face a double threat: poverty and climate change.
The new United Nations report highlights weather-disaster relation while offering a perspective on the incidence of each. Firstly flood accounted for 47 percent of the weather-related disasters registered throughout the past two decades. Of those most affected by floods, 115 million people in Asia top the list. Asia is most exposed to floods with its low-lying coast regions, land mass, flood plains.
Storms and the horryifying hurricanes took their toll on 12,000 lives per year. 90 percent of the deaths related to hurricanes and storms happened in poor countries. The United Nations report also underlines that between 2005 and 2014, the average of weather-related disasters increased 14 percent compared to the previous period and 50 percent compared to 1985-1994.
The report doesn’t establish a link between the weather-related disasters. However, it does note that with modelling and predictions showing an increase in the extreme weather events of our near future, weather-related disasters are bound to occur more often.
The United Nations report also offers a few measures that could go a long way in improving risk management. Among them, the report mentions flood control through reforestation and afforestation, embankments, wetland restoration and better warning system.
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