Terrifying! The NAD team referred to a report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that said the number of people displaced by disaster is almost greater than that by conflict.
More deaths and damage have occurred over 50 years from storms, floods, and drought as well as from conflict – and worse is expected to continue. Just think of the current reports of Hurricane Ida causing a State of Emergency in New York at present, also unleashing rain in New England with threats of tornados. And from South Africa, we hear of snow in the Cape and KwaZulu-Natal!
Network Africa Germany (NAD) pointed to the recent report of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) which spoke of 31 million displaced in 2020. Covid and extreme weather “attacked us at the same time” in a “multi-hazard world”, like Asst. Secretary-General Mami Mizutori said.
How can anyone doubt that climate change is happening in view of everything? Weather disasters are striking four to five times more often and causing seven times more damage than in the 1970s, according to the UN weather agency. The Middle East and Antarctica areas had been exposed to “more dramatic climate change” than anywhere else, said Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, warning of the negative impact of Africa’s population growth and climate change.
In the 1970s, weather disasters cost about $175 million a year globally, rising in the 2010s to $1.38 billion a year. Such events averaged about 711 a year, increasing from 2000 to 2009 up to 3,536 a year, i.e. nearly 10 a day, dropping slightly in the 2010s to 3,165. More than 90% of the more than 2 million deaths occur in “developing nations“, nearly 60% of the economic damage in richer countries.
The five most expensive weather disasters since 1970 were US storms led in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. The Ethiopian drought and famine in the mid-1980s and Cyclone Bhola in Bangladesh in 1970 topped the five worst such occurrences in Africa and Asia.