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– It is incomprehensible that we knowingly and intentionally continue sowing the seeds of our own destruction, writes among others Mami Mizutori, head of the United Nations Office for Crisis Risk Reduction, in a recent report.
The researchers behind the report believe that world leaders and others in the business world have failed to take action to reduce climate change and prevent Earth from becoming an “uninhabitable hell for millions of people,” writes CNN.
Almost doubling
The number of weather disasters has increased considerably over the last 20 years. According to the report, the world has been affected by 6,681 cases of extreme weather since 1999, a sharp jump from the previous two decades, which recorded 3,656 cases, writes Reuters.
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Including earthquakes and tsunamis, the number is close to 7,350 in the past two decades and more than 1.2 million lives have been lost. At the same time, 4.2 billion people have been affected by disasters to a greater or lesser degree. The financial consequences have also been enormous.
Temperatures have risen sharply, causing the earth to be more frequently affected by extreme weather conditions and disasters, and floods, heat waves, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires have all risen sharply in recent years. .
Highest increase in 12,000 years
– Grim future
According to the report, Asia is the continent that has seen the most disasters, with more than 3,000 incidents between 2000 and 2019. Only China had 500 of them, and it is the most affected country in the world, followed by the United States with 467 disasters. North and South America have experienced a total of 1,756 disasters, while in Africa the number is 1,192, writes CNN.
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The tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008, and the earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 are classified as so-called mega-disasters, because they all killed more than 100,000 people. And all three events are the worst natural disasters the world has seen during the 2000s.
Historic polar explorers return home. They are scared
Debarati Guha-Sapir of the Belgian Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters warns in the report that if the number of climate disasters continues to rise at the same rate over the next 20 years, “humanity faces a very bleak future.” .
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Move along
Today, the world is heading for a 3.2 degree Celsius rise in temperatures, unless industrialized nations slash their emissions.
In the 2015 Paris Agreement, the countries of the world pledged to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. If the goal is to be achieved, the researchers behind the report write that the world must reduce emissions by 7.2 percent each year for the next ten years.
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But progress remains to be seen, says UN Secretary General António Guterres, according to CNN. It has the support of Copernicus researcher Freja Vambourg.
– There is little difference between 2020 and 2016 so far, he tells the AFP news agency.
In the twelve-month period up to and including September, our planet was almost 1.3 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial level, according to the EU’s climate monitoring service Copernicus, according to NTB.
