Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
aster in the middle of what is now Bangladesh, would that information have been accurately collected? In
general, wecanexpect thatinmorerecent years,moreofthedeathswererecordedandthatinearlier years,
fewer of the deaths were recorded. For some countries, there is simply no good data, because in underde-
veloped places like Haiti or Ethiopia, we do not even know exactly how many people lived in a particular
place before a disaster struck. Today we have much better information—and because disaster statistics are
tied to aid, there is an incentive to overreport.
And the more we dig into the data, the stronger the correlations get.
Figure 5.1: More Fossil Fuels, Fewer Climate-Related Deaths
Sources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2013); Etheridge et al. (1998); Keeling et al. (2001); MacFarling Meure et al.
(2006); Merged Ice-Core Record Data, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; EM-DAT International Disaster Database
Here are a couple of striking numbers from the data: In the decade from 2004 to 2013, worldwide
climate-related deaths (including droughts, floods, extreme temperatures, wildfires, and storms)
plummeted to a level 88.6 percent below that of the peak decade, 1930 to 1939.
2
The year 2013, with
29,404reporteddeaths,had99.4percentfewerclimate-related deathsthanthehistoricrecordyearof1932,
which had 5,073,283 reported deaths for the same category.
3
That reduction occurred despite more complete reporting, an incentive by poor nations to declare great-
er damage to gain more aid, and a massively growing population, particularly in vulnerable places like
coastal areas, in recent times.
