{"id":2245,"date":"2010-01-02T08:49:40","date_gmt":"2010-01-02T15:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/?p=2245"},"modified":"2010-02-25T11:15:02","modified_gmt":"2010-02-25T18:15:02","slug":"deaths-and-cost-from-natural-disasters-down-significantly-in-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/national-weather\/deaths-and-cost-from-natural-disasters-down-significantly-in-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Deaths and cost from natural disasters down significantly in 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"
A distinct lack of major natural catastrophes resulted in lower costs and less of a loss of life in 2009. German reinsurer Munich Re AG said in its annual disaster report<\/a> that approximately 10,000 people lost their lives and $50 billion in losses was realized during the year.\u00a0 The company warned however that manmade climate change will soon reverse those numbers.<\/div>\n

In terms of lives lost, with approximately 10,000 people killed during 2009, the year fell far short of the average of 75,000. This was also significantly less than in 2008 when 220,000 were killed by natural disasters<\/a>. That year saw two major catastrophes \u2013 Cyclone Nargis and an earthquake in China\u2019s Sichuan province \u2013 case the vast majority of lives lost.<\/p>\n

The insurer\u2019s numbers match closely with a report released last month by the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR)<\/a> which put the annual death toll at 8,919. The most significant events in 2009 were an earthquake in Indonesia in September which killed 1,117, flooding in India in July that killed 992 and a series of typhoons and tropical storms that struck the Philippines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Economic losses were also below the decadal average of $115 billion per year. 2009\u2019s reported losses fall at less than half of that and far below the $200 billion mark that was seen in 2008. Munich Re said, \u201cLosses were far lower in 2009 than in 2008 due to the absence on the whole of major catastrophes and a very benign North Atlantic hurricane season<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"There's<\/a>For the rest of this story and to see how climate change could cause greater impact from natural disasters, please visit the Natural Disasters Examiner.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A distinct lack of major natural catastrophes resulted in lower costs and less of a loss of life in 2009. German reinsurer Munich Re AG said in its annual disaster report that approximately 10,000 people lost their lives and $50 billion in losses was realized during the year.\u00a0 The company warned however that manmade climate … Continue reading Deaths and cost from natural disasters down significantly in 2009<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5],"tags":[224,735,295],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2245"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2407,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245\/revisions\/2407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thorntonweather.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}