UN official highlights how better preparedness has reduced disaster deaths despite worsening climate | national news

As climate change makes disasters like cyclones, floods, and droughts more intense, more frequent, and hitting more places, fewer people die from these catastrophes globally because of better warning, planning, and resilience. a top United Nations official said.

The world hasn’t really noticed how the kind of storms that once killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people now claim only a few lives, said the new UN assistant secretary-general, Kamal Kishore, who heads the UN office for disaster risk reduction. Associated Press. But he said much more needed to be done to prevent these disasters from pushing people into absolute poverty.

“Fewer people are dying in disasters, and if you look at it as a proportion of the total population, it’s even less,” Kishore said in his first interview since taking office in mid-May. “We often take for granted the progress we’ve made.”

“Twenty years ago there was no tsunami early warning system, except in a small part of the world. Now the whole world is covered by a tsunami warning system” after the 2004 tsunami that killed about 230,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, Kishore said.

People are getting better warnings about tropical cyclones – also called hurricanes and typhoons – so now the chances of dying in a tropical cyclone in a place like the Philippines are about a third of what they were 20 years ago, a Kishore said.

As India’s former disaster chief, Kishore points to how his country has reduced the number of deaths thanks to better warnings and community preparedness, such as hospitals being prepared for a surge in births during a cyclone. In 1999, a super cyclone hit eastern India, killing nearly 10,000 people. Then a storm of nearly similar size hit in 2013, but only killed a few dozen people. Last year, under Kishore’s watch, Cyclone Biparjoy killed less than 10 people.

The same is true for flood-related deaths, Kishore said.

The data supports Kishore, said epidemiologist Debarati Guha-Sapir of the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, who has created a global disaster database. Her database — which she admits has missing pieces — shows that global deaths per storm event have fallen from a 10-year average of 24 in 2008 to a 10-year average of about 8 in 2021. Flood deaths per event, ten years have passed. annual averages of nearly 72 to about 31, her data indicate.

While there are fewer deaths globally from disasters, there are still areas in the poorest countries, particularly in Africa, where deaths are getting worse or at least staying the same, Guha-Sapir said. It’s much like public health efforts to eradicate measles, successful in most places, but the areas that can cope the least are not improving, she said.

India and Bangladesh are poster nations for better disaster response and death prevention, especially during cyclones, Guha-Sapir said. In 1970, a cyclone killed more than 300,000 people in Bangladesh in one of the worst natural disasters of the 20th century, and now “Bangladesh has done a fantastic job in disaster risk reduction for years and years and years” , she said.

Highlighting the victories is important, Guha-Sapir said: “Gloom and doom will never get us anywhere.”

While countries like India and Bangladesh have built warning systems, strengthened buildings like hospitals, and know what to do to prepare for and then respond to disasters, much of it is also because these countries are becoming increasingly wealthier and better educated, and thus can better cope with disasters and protect themselves, Guha-Sapir said. Poorer countries and people cannot.

“Fewer people are dying, but that’s not because climate change isn’t happening,” Kishore said, “That’s despite climate change. And that’s because we invested in resilience, we invested in early warning systems.”

Kishore said climate change is making his work harder, but he said he doesn’t feel like Sisyphus, the mythical man pushing a giant boulder up a hill.

“You have more intense hazards, more frequently, and (in) new geographies,” Kishore said, saying that places like Brazil that didn’t worry much about flooding before are now being devastated. The same goes for extreme heat, which he said was only a problem for certain countries but has now spread globally, pointing to nearly 60,000 heatwave deaths in Europe in 2022.

India, where temperatures have flirted with 122 degrees (50 degrees Celsius), has reduced heat deaths with specific regional plans, Kishore said.

“However, with the new extreme temperatures we are seeing, every country must redouble their efforts to save lives,” he said. And that means looking at the built environment of cities, he added.

Reducing deaths is only part of the battle to reduce risk, Kishore said.

“We are doing a better job of saving lives but not livelihoods,” Kishore said.

While fewer people are dying, “you’re looking at people losing their homes, people losing their businesses, a small farmer running a poultry farm,” Kishore said. When they are flooded or hit by a storm, they can survive, but they have nothing, no seeds, no fishing boats.

“We’re not doing as well as we should be in that,” Kishore said. “We cannot accept that there will be losses. Of course they will occur, but they could be minimized by an order of magnitude.”

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