Weather disasters have become twice as frequent in 20 years, UN says

Weather-related disasters such asfloods and heatwaves have occurred almost daily in the pastdecade, almost twice as often as two decades ago, with Asiabeing the hardest hit region, a UN report said on Monday.

While the report authors could not pin the increase whollyon climate change, they did say that the upward trend was likelyto 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 per cent of all disasters, it said.

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A recent peak year was 2002, when drought in India hit 200million and a sandstorm in China affected 100 million. But thestandout mega-disaster was Cyclone Nargis, which killed 138,000in Myanmar in 2008.

While geophysical causes such as earthquakes, volcanoes andtsunamis often grab the headlines, they only make up one in 10of the disasters trawled from a database defined by the impact.

The report, called "The Human Cost of Weather RelatedDisasters," found there were an average of 335 weather-relateddisasters annually between 2005 and August this year, up 14per cent from 1995-2004 and almost twice as many as in the yearsfrom 1985 to 1994.

"While scientists cannot calculate what percentage of thisrise is due to climate change, predictions of more extreme
weather in future almost certainly mean that we will witness acontinued upward trend in weather-related disasters in thedecades ahead," the report said.

The release of the report comes a week before world leadersgather in Paris to discuss plans to curb greenhouse gas
emissions and prevent world temperatures rising.

The United Nations says atmospheric levels of carbondioxide, the main greenhouse gas that causes global warming,
have risen to a new record every year for the past 30 years.

'Floods are definitely increasing'

"All we can say is that certain disaster types areincreasing. Floods are definitely increasing," said Debarati
Guha-Sapir, professor at the Centre for Research on theEpidemiology of Disasters at UCL University in Louvain, Belgium,which co-authored the report.

"Whether it's increasing due to global warming, I think it'ssafe to say the jury's out on that. But rather than focus on theifs, whys and wherefores, I think we should focus on how tomanage floods."

Margareta Wahlstrom, head of the UNOffice for DisasterRisk Reduction (UNISDR), said floods were not just caused byheavy rain but also by poorly planned construction.

UNISDR estimates natural disasters of all types cause lossesof $250 billion-$300 billion globally each year.

The report drew on a database of weather events that definesan event as a disaster if 10 or more people are killed, 100 ormore are affected, a state of emergency is declared, or if thereis a call for international assistance.

The countries hit by the highest number of weather-relateddisasters over the past decade were the United States, with 472,China with 441, India with 288, the Philippines with 274 andIndonesia with 163.