Global Damage From Extreme Weather And Other Disasters Set To Break $200 Billion A Year
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The report, which makes the case for greater global investment in climate resiliency and disaster risk management, found that worldwide losses from such events have been steadily rising since at least 1980. “Over the last 30 years, the world has lost more than 2.5 million people and almost $4 trillion to natural disasters,” said Rachel Kyte, World Bank Vice-President for Sustainable Development, citing work from the global reinsurance giant Munich Re. “And three quarters of those losses are a result of extreme weather.”
The damage can vary significantly from year to year. The specific losses for 2012 were just over $150 billion, for example. And there was a record spike to over $400 billion in global losses in 2011 — a year, according to work from the Center for American Progress, that included just over $160 billion in damages from extreme weather in the U.S. alone.
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The people most vulnerable to this rising tide of weather disasters are the global poor in areas like South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. They’re the populations least able to prepare for or absorb the effects of extreme weather — particularly in urban areas where climate change threatens to disrupt food supplies — and they’re the least able to recover from “recurrent, low-intensity events” than cumulatively cripple livelihoods, entrench global poverty, and exacerbate global inequality.
The World Bank estimated that 325 million of the global poor could be exposed to weather disasters by 2030. The recent 2014 Climate Change Vulnerability Index also pegged those populations, which are finally on the cusp of attaining real economic development, as facing “extreme risk” from climate change.
More:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/11/19/2968161/global-disaster-damage-200-billion/
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