5 disasters a day - 560 a year - by 2030, as humans put themselves on a"spiral of self-destruction" by heating up the climate and ignoring risk, pushing millions more people into poverty, the United Nations warned on Tuesday .
"The science is clear. It is less costly to take action before a disaster devastates than to wait until destruction is done and respond after it has happened," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The new UNDRR report said increasingly frequent and intense disasters have killed or affected more people in the last five years than in the previous five-year period, and could push an additional 100 million people into poverty by 2030.
Disasters have cost an average of about US$170 billion each year in the last decade, the report said, with developing nations and their poorest people suffering disproportionately. In the Philippines, for example, millions of people are still recovering from Typhoon Rai, which struck in December, killing over 300 people and leaving hundreds of thousands more displaced, along with about $500 million in damages.