Cred crunch, Issue no. 61, December 2020 - Human cost of disasters (2000-2019)
Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters
Number of pages
Over the last twenty years, 7,348 disaster events were recorded worldwide by EM-DAT, one of the foremost international databases of such events. In total, disasters claimed approximately 1.23 million lives, an average of 60,000 per annum, and affected a total of over 4 billion people (many on more than one occasion). Additionally, disasters led to approximately US$ 2.97 trillion in economic losses worldwide.
The newsletter provides a short overview of the human cost of disasters and key recommendations, a longer, comprehensive version of which can be found in the report "The human cost of disasters: an overview of the last 20 years (2000-2019)".