A Reuters News Report by Tom Miles picks up on a UN report released today, Monday November 23, 2015.
Weather-related disasters such as floods and heatwaves have occurred almost daily in the past decade, almost twice as often as two decades ago, with Asia being the hardest hit region, a U.N. report said on Monday.
While the report authors could not pin the increase wholly on climate change, they did say that the upward trend was likely to continue as extreme weather events increased.
Since 1995, weather disasters have killed 606,000 people, left 4.1 billion injured, homeless or in need of aid, and accounted for 90 percent of all disasters, it said.
….
The report, called "The Human Cost of Weather Related Disasters 1995-2015", found there were an average of 335 weather-related disasters annually between 2005 and August this year, up 14 percent from 1995-2004 and almost twice as many as in the years from 1985 to 1994.
"While scientists cannot calculate what percentage of this rise is due to climate change, predictions of more extreme weather in future almost certainly mean that we will witness a continued upward trend in weather-related disasters in the decades ahead," the report said.
emphasis added
While the news reports waffle on the link to Climate Change, the foreword of the report (pdf) takes a more urgent tone.
This publication provides a sober and revealing analysis of weather-related disaster trends over a twenty year time-frame which coincides with a period which has seen the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties become an established high- profile annual fixture on the development calendar. The contents of this report underline why it is so important that a new climate change agreement emerges from the COP21 in Paris in December.
This would be a satisfying conclusion to a year which started off strongly with the adoption in March of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 which sets out priorities for action in order to achieve a substantial reduction in disaster losses. The Sendai Framework has since been followed by agreements on development financing and the ambition of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by UN Member States in September.
Climate change, climate variability and weather events pose a threat to the eradication of extreme poverty and should serve as a spur to hasten efforts not only to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also to tackle other underlying risk drivers such as unplanned urban development, vulnerable livelihoods, environmental degradation and gaps in early warnings.
The report highlights many key shortcomings in understanding the nature and true extent of disaster losses, particularly from drought despite the fact that it accounts for more than 25% of all people affected by climate-related disasters.
There must be greater support to countries struggling to measure their losses so they can improve both risk reduction efforts and overall understanding of where the focus needs to be to reduce those very losses.
The more we understand the causes and consequences of risk generation and accumulation, the better we will be able to adapt, mitigate and prevent in the future, whatever that future may have in store for us.
emphasis added
Hundreds of thousands of people killed, millions at risk, billions of dollars in damage… If an enemy did this to us, we’d be at war right now and the bombs would be falling. It’s fitting the talks will be taking place in Paris, but will the world pay attention to this with the same focus it’s given the actions of a handful of terrorists?