New York, April 26 (BNA) A report issued by the United Nations said that a world exhausted by disasters will be affected more in the coming years by more disasters colliding in an interconnected world.
The scientific report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said that if current trends continue, the world will go from about 400 disasters per year in 2015 to an onslaught of about 560 disasters per year by 2030. The report said that compared to the period from 1970 to 2000, the report said The world suffers from 90 to 100 medium to large-scale disasters every year.
The report predicted that the number of extreme heat waves in 2030 will be three times what it was in 2001 and there will be 30% more droughts. It’s not just natural disasters amplified by climate change, it’s COVID-19, economic meltdowns and food shortages. The authors of the report said that climate change has a huge footprint in the number of disasters.
People did not realize how much disasters actually cost today, said Mami Mizutori, head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, “If we don’t move the curve, we will reach a point where we cannot manage the consequences of a disaster,” she said. “We are just in this vicious cycle. .”
This means that society needs to rethink how it is funded and dealt with, and talk about disaster risk and what it values most, the report said. Currently, about 90% of disaster spending is emergency relief, with only 6% on reconstruction and 4% on prevention, Mizutori said in an interview Monday.
Not every hurricane or earthquake has to turn into a disaster, Mizutori said. Much harm is avoided by planning and prevention.
In 1990, disasters cost the world about $70 billion a year. Now they cost more than $170 billion annually, after adjusting for inflation, according to the report’s authors. That doesn’t include the indirect costs that we rarely think about, Mizutori said.
Mizutori said disaster deaths have been steadily declining for years due to better warnings and prevention. But in the past five years, deaths from disasters have been “significantly more” than the previous five, said report co-author Roger Polwarti, a climate scientist and social scientist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Mizutori said that’s because both COVID-19 and climate change disasters have reached places they weren’t used to, like tropical cyclones hitting Mozambique. It’s also the way disasters interact with one another, exacerbating damage, such as wildfires, heat waves or war in Ukraine, as well as food and fuel shortages, Polwarti said.
If a society changes the way it thinks about risk and prepares for disasters, the recent increase in annual disaster deaths could be temporary, Polwarti said, otherwise it is more likely the “new abnormality.”
advertisement
Disasters hit poorer countries harder than rich countries, said Marcus Ininkel, co-author of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, with recovery costs taking a greater part of the economy in countries that can’t afford it.
“These are events that can undo hard-earned development gains, driving already vulnerable communities or entire regions into a downward spiral,” he said.
The massive onslaught of disasters is piling up, Polwarti said, like small diseases that attack and weaken the body’s immune system.
The report calls for an overhaul in the way we talk about risks. For example, instead of asking about the chances of a disaster happening this year, say 5%, officials should think about the chances over 25 years, which makes that highly likely. Mizutori said that talking about 100-year floods or the chances of something happening twice in 100 years makes it seem far-fetched.
“In a world of mistrust and misinformation, this is key to the way forward,” said Susan Cutter, co-director of the Institute for Vulnerability and Resilience at the University of South Carolina, who was not part of the report. “We can move forward to reduce the underlying drivers of risk: inequality, poverty and most importantly climate change.”