A report by the UNDRR, the UN Office of Disaster Risk Reduction said that the world faced 7348 disaster events between 2000-2019 which is 75 per cent more than that of the disaster events recorded between 1980 and 1999.
The report titled ‘Human Cost of the Disasters’, released on October 13, 2020 says that the disasters recorded between 2000-2019 claimed 1.23 million lives and caused 2.97 trillion USD economic losses to the global economy.
Compared with the 3,656 climate related disasters between 1980 and 1999, the previous 20 years recorded 6,681 climate related disasters which affected 3.9 billion people and caused 510,837 deaths, which is a significant increase.
Extreme events such as floods, storms, heatwaves droughts and wildfires accounted for almost 91 per cent of all the natural disasters recorded in the last 20 years.
The 2000-2019 period recorded 1.23 million disasters deaths which is slightly higher than that of 1980-1999 (1.19 million). The report attributes this in the improvements made in early warnings, disaster preparedness and responses.
This is clear evidence that in a world where the global average temperature in 2019 was 1.1˚C above the preindustrial period, the impacts are being felt in the increased frequency of extreme weather events including heat waves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes and wildfires.
A temperature increase of 3°C of the global climate is estimated to increase the frequency of potentially high impact natural hazard events across the world. This could render current national and local strategies for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation obsolete in many countries.
Shifting rainfall patterns and greater variability in precipitation poses a risk to the 70% of global agriculture that is rain-fed and the 1.3 billion people dependent on degrading agricultural land.
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) was established in 1999 to facilitate the implementation of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR).
As the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, UNDRR brings governments, partners and communities together to reduce disaster risk and losses and to ensure a safer, sustainable future.
UNDRR’s current mandate was set down in UN General Assembly Resolution 69/283, adopted in June 2015.
UNDRR has its headquarters in Geneva (Switzerland) and implements its mandate through five offices in the Asia-Pacific region (Bangkok), Africa (Nairobi), Europe (Brussels), Arab States (Cairo) and Latin America and the Caribbean (Panama).
Its Office for Northeast Asia and Global Education and Training Institute is located in Incheon (Republic of Korea). UNDRR also maintains a UN Headquarters liaison office in New York, and presences in Bonn (Germany), Kobe (Japan), Suva (Fiji), Almaty (Kazakhstan) and Rio (Brazil).