Disaster & climate: injury facts

The figures

Who is most affected

The World Meteorological Organization counted nearly 12 000 disasters from weather, climate and water-related events between 1970 and 2021, with a death toll of 2 million — and 90% of those deaths in developing countries.

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction found the same pattern over a shorter window: 7,348 major recorded disaster events between 2000 and 2019, claiming 1.23 million lives and affecting 4.2 billion people, with Asia carrying the highest number of events.

The people who die in a disaster are rarely the people who could most afford to prepare for one. Early warning, building standards, evacuation routes and functioning emergency services are the difference between a hazard and a catastrophe, and they are exactly what is thinnest where the deaths concentrate.

Where and how it happens

Floods and storms are the most common events. UNDRR recorded major floods more than doubling between the two twenty-year periods it compared, from 1,389 to 3,254, with storms rising from 1,457 to 2,034 over the same span.

Most flood deaths are drownings. WHO puts drowning at 75% of deaths in flood disasters, and notes that the risk is highest in low- and middle-income countries where early warning systems and flood mitigation infrastructure are underdeveloped.

Earthquakes and tsunamis behave differently from weather hazards: rarer, less predictable, and capable of killing more people in a single event than a decade of storms. UNDRR notes that geophysical events killed more people than any other hazard type in the period it reviewed.

The trend

More events, more people affected, and — over the long run — fewer deaths per event. UNDRR puts the average at approximately 60,000 deaths a year across 2000 to 2019, and notes that the deadliest single events of that period, and the years with the highest death tolls, all fell in its first decade.

The economic side moves the other way. UNDRR put global economic losses at approximately US$2.97 trillion for 2000 to 2019, well above the previous twenty years. More people and more property in exposed places means a hazard of the same size costs more.

What counts as a disaster

The numbers on this page come from the Emergency Events Database maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, which records an event when it has killed ten or more people, affected a hundred or more, resulted in a declared state of emergency, or prompted a call for international assistance.

That threshold is worth knowing. A flood that displaces a village and kills nobody does not enter the count, and a country with better reporting will appear to have more disasters than a country with worse reporting.

By country

India is one of the few countries that counts deaths from natural hazards every year in a single national series. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 7,903 deaths attributable to forces of nature in 2024. Lightning caused 35.7% of them and heat or sun stroke a further 23.2%, so the two together account for well over half — a toll made up of many small events rather than a handful of named disasters, which is exactly the kind of loss that never reaches an international disaster database.

What prevents it

• Early warning systems that reach the people who have to act on them. WHO names these directly as a way to prevent drowning during floods; UNDRR treats them as a core commitment under the Sendai Framework.
• Flood risk management through land use planning: not building where the water goes, and not removing what absorbs it. WHO lists land use planning alongside preparedness planning as flood drowning prevention.
• Disaster preparedness planning at national and local level. UNDRR's reporting is built around the Sendai Framework target of having national and local disaster risk reduction strategies in place, and it tracks how many countries actually have them.
• Building standards and enforcement, which is what turns an earthquake into a damaged building instead of a collapsed one.
• Rescue and resuscitation capability for bystanders and professional responders, one of the strategies in WHO's PROTECT package for drowning prevention and directly relevant to flood response.
• Threat preparedness for floods and other multi-hazard emergencies, also named in WHO's PROTECT package — planning for more than one hazard at a time, because they arrive together.
• Recording what happened. The worldwide picture exists because agencies record events against a common definition; a country that does not report cannot be seen, and cannot be helped.

How to read these numbers

• The two headline periods on this page are different. The World Meteorological Organization covers 1970 to 2021 and weather, climate and water-related hazards only; UNDRR covers 2000 to 2019 and includes geophysical events such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Do not compare them directly and do not add them.
• Both rest on the Emergency Events Database, which records an event only above a threshold of deaths, people affected, an emergency declaration or a call for international assistance. Smaller events are real and are not in these counts. The UNDRR review was published in October 2020 and does not include biological hazards, so nothing on this page speaks to pandemic mortality.
• Disaster death tolls are revised for years after the event, and the largest single events dominate any average. A period that happens to contain one catastrophic event will look far worse than the years around it.
• Economic loss figures are in current dollars as published and are not adjusted to a common year. Treat them as an order of magnitude, not a precise comparison across decades.

The observances that campaign on this

Sources cited on this page

1. World Meteorological Organization — Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water-related Hazards (1970–2021) — wmo.int, read 29 September 2026.
2. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction — UN report: Dramatic rise in climate disaster over last twenty years (update) — www.undrr.org, read 29 September 2026.
3. World Health Organization — Drowning (fact sheet) — www.who.int, read 29 September 2026.
4. National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India — Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India 2024: Snapshots — www.ncrb.gov.in, read 29 September 2026.