Cred Crunch, Issue No. 58, April 2020 - Disaster* Year in Review 2019

This document provides a review of disaster deaths, economic losses, human impacts and the worst affected countries in 2019. In 2019, at least 396 natural disasters were reported in EM-DAT killing 11,755 people, affecting 95 million others and costing nearly 130 billion US$. The number of events this year is slightly over the average of the last 10 years (343 disasters events recorded in EM-DAT). At a regional level, Asia was the most vulnerable continent with 40% of all disaster events, accounting for 45% of the total deaths and 74% of the people affected by disasters globally.

The conclusions of the document are :

• Floods and storms accounted for 68% of the total number of affected people;
• Wildfires have captured international attention and rightly so;
• Extreme temperatures, especially heat waves, are underreported and current figures do not give the ‘complete’ picture of their massive human impact, neither in Europe or in the poorest countries;
• Nearly half the total number of affected people were located in just 4 developing countries: India, Iran, Philippines and Zimbabwe;
• While economic costs are increasingly better reported, especially in developed countries, human impacts, including deaths, remain significantly underestimated.