The Humanitarian Costs of Climate Change

Natural disasters affected on average more than 250,000,000 people per year in the past decade. A closer look at these data indicates that the global number of people affected has been increasing steadily, by an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 people per decade, since the early 1970s.

Natural disasters matter.They directly destroy lives, as reflected in the disaster fatality rates, and they devastate and wreak havoc on livelihoods, with long term consequences, as suggested by the disaster-affected numbers.

People’s vulnerability to extreme natural events is a product of economics, politics, and location—we will comment more on this later. But it is the climate, and its daily projection as weather, that provides the hazards that act upon that vulnerability.