Natural disasters are getting more intense and deadly, study says

 The number of natural disasters that occur in the world remains stable, but now they are more intense and deadly, confirmed this Thursday a joint analysis of the United Nations Organization and the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).

"The number of disasters has not increased significantly, but each event is more intense and its impact is greater", confirmed the expert of that center, Debarati Guha-Sapir, when presenting the study in which twenty years of data related to natural disasters.

Its publication coincides with the International Day for Disaster Reduction and with the crisis that Haiti suffers after the passage of Hurricane Matthew, which has left the southwest of the country in ruins, hundreds of dead, and thousands of injured.

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In the last two decades, 7,056 natural disasters have occurred that have caused 1.35 million deaths, of which 90% have occurred in low- and middle-income countries. Those that have caused the most mortality are earthquakes and tsunamis.

No developed country is in the list of the ten that have registered the most deaths from natural disasters and that Haiti leads, with 229,699 deaths in the period 1996-2015.

They are followed by Indonesia (180,136) and Burma (139,515), which like Haiti suffered equally great disasters: the Indian Ocean tsunami and Cyclone Nargis, in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Following the highest mortality from disasters are China (123,937), India (97,691), Pakistan (85,400), Russia (58,545), Sri Lanka (36,433), Iran (32,181) and Venezuela (30,319).

Among European countries, the common cause of the highest death rates was the 2003 heatwave, which left around 20,000 dead in both Italy and France; about 15,000 in Spain and more than 9,300 in Germany.

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Japan is the other industrialized country with a high mortality rate, in this case, due to the 2011 earthquake, which caused about 20,000 deaths. In general, mortality in poor countries is estimated to be five times higher from comparable disasters than in poor nations.

Likewise, the official estimate of fatalities from natural disasters such as heat waves is believed to be much lower than reality, particularly in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Of what if there is a certainty that between 80 and 85% of natural disasters are related to climate change.

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