2020s 13,000 (world population 8 billion)
1970s 99,000 (world population 4 billion)
1920s 524,000 (world population 2 billion)
* Our World in Data
Each year brings about the same count of floods, earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts, hurricanes and cyclones, and other tragedies and disasters of geology and weather. But the toll these events take on life, society, and the economy seems to lessen over time. Website Our World in Data, using a simultaneously gloomy and hopeful database developed by the University of Louvain, summarizes:
“[O]ver the course of the 20th century there was a significant decline in global deaths from natural disasters. In the early 1900s, the annual average was often in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 deaths. In the second half of the century and into the early 2000s, we have seen a significant decline to less than 100,000 — at least five times lower than these peaks. This decline is even more impressive when we consider the rate of population growth over this period. When we correct for population — showing this data in terms of death rates (measured per 100,000 people) — then we see a more than 10-fold decline over the past century.”
Why? Gingerly comparing two sets of historical tragedies and disasters:
Japan and Earthquakes: This September marks the centennial of the Great Kanto Earthquake, the deadliest in Japanese history, which struck Taisho-era Tokyo in 1923. Believed to have reached 7.8 on the Richter Scale,* the quake killed over 105,000 of the city’s then-2.2 million residents through building collapses and fires. (Based on the Japanese government’s most recent estimates; earlier estimates were closer to 150,000.) The vastly larger Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 — 9.1 on the Richter scale, 20 times more powerful than the 1923 event — is thought by geologists the fourth-largest earthquake ever measured anywhere. It nonetheless took many fewer lives, because of the efficiency of Japan’s urban building codes, sea walls able to absorb at least some of the tsunami impact, immediate electronic warnings to bullet trains and motorists, and rapid-response civil defense bureaucracy.
Bangladesh and Cyclones: The Bhola Cyclone which struck Bangladesh in 1970, during which winds reached 145 mph, may have killed half a million people. More recent cyclones, though sometimes comparably powerful, are less deadly. The 2020 “super-Cyclone Amphan” and its 150 mph winds, for example, took 26 lives in Bangladesh, 98 in India’s neighboring West Bengal province, and 4 in Sri Lanka. Drawn from a least-developed country rather than Japan’s high-income, high-tech economy, Bangladesh’s post-Bhola experience is an equally powerful illustration of the ways in which weather service, evacuation drills, cultivated coastal mangrove forests to absorb storm impact, and evacuation drills are, though unable to prevent disasters, can make them far less dangerous.
More generally, the Our World in Data figures suggest that the level of annual disaster deaths is quite variable, and not precisely comparable across time since large individual events often affect not only annual totals but decade-long averages. Nonetheless, the broad trend seems clear. The 1920s featured the highest number of annual disaster deaths on average in OWiD‘s table, at over half a million per year. In the 1970s, a half-century later, the average was just below 100,000 disaster deaths per year. For the 2010s, it was 45,000 per year; and for the incomplete 2020s, the lowest of all at 13,000 per year.
The scale of this decline varies for different kinds of events. The sharpest reductions are in deaths to droughts and consequent famines, which are down 99.8% from the 472,400 per year average of the 1920s to 2,012 per year in the 2010s and 837 per year so far in the 2020s. (Famines remained significant causes of death in South Asia through the 1940s and in China to the early 1960s, and in the Horn of Africa until the last such event in anarchic Somalia 30 years ago. Better infrastructure, emergency relief, globalization, and multiple sources of food can ensure that people don’t starve when local or individual international sources go down, people no longer starve.) Losses to inland river floods have dropped almost as sharply. Those to earthquakes and tsunamis seem more uneven, with the recent averages much affected by the 2007 Port-au-Prince earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunami which struck Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka in 2004. Hurricane and cyclone mortality, finally, is down about 90%, from 12,000 to 14,000 per year in the mid-20th century to about 1,600 per year so far in the 2020s, with Bangladesh’s post-Bhola experience striking evidence for the success of preparation and disaster relief in vulnerable least-developed countries. Last word to Our World in Data:
“This trend does not mean that disasters have become less frequent, or less intense. It means the world today is much better at preventing deaths from disasters than in the past.”
Stats on natural disasters from Our World in Data.
… direct to a 1900s-2020s table of declining natural disaster tolls by decade.
… and the University of Louvain’s disaster database.
Japan –
The Japan Times reports on Japan’s information-sharing on tsunami and earthquake preparation.
… and Minimisanrikyu twelve years after the Great Tohoku Earthquake.
Bangladesh –
The Bangladesh Cyclone Preparedness Program.
The World Meteorological Organization on Cyclone Bhola and its lessons.
The Guardian on super-cyclone Amphan.
And the U.S. National Institutes of Health (2012) reflect on declining cyclone mortality in Bangladesh.
More –
Tsunami preparation in Thailand.
East African Community plans drought and storm responses.
And the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s International division.
And some long looks back at three turn-of-the-last-century U.S. events –
California: The U.S. Geological Survey analyzes the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, thought to have killed 2,000 people.
Texas: NPR on the 1900 Galveston hurricane and its 6,000-12,000 lost lives.
Pennsylvania: Johnstown remembers the 1889 flood and its 2208 deaths.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank Progressive Economy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
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