Statistics of Disasters in Recent Years and loses

Natural Disasters kills ten thousands per year

The number of deaths from natural disasters can be highly variable from year-to-year; some years pass with very few deaths before a large disaster event claims many lives.

If we look at the average over the past decade, approximately 45,000 people globally died from natural disasters each year. This represents around 0.1% of global deaths.

In the visualizations shown here we see the annual variability in the number and share of deaths from natural disasters in recent decades.

What we see is that in many years, the number of deaths can be very low - often less than 10,000, and accounting for as low as 0.01% of total deaths. But we also see the devastating impact of shock events: the 1983-85 famine and drought in Ethiopia; the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; Cyclone Nargis which struck Myanmar in 2008; and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti.

The worlds Deadliest Earthquake

The number of people dying in natural disasters is lower today than it was in the past, the world has become more resilient.

Earthquakes, however, can still claim a large number of lives. Whilst historically floods, droughts and epidemics dominated disaster, a high annual death toll now often results from a major earthquake and possibly a tsunami caused by them. Since 2000, the two peak years in annual death tolls (reaching 100s of thousands) were 2004 and 2010. Earthquake deaths accounted for 93 percent and 69 percent of such deaths, respectively. In fact, both events (the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami of 2004, and Port-au-Prince earthquake in 2010) are in the deadliest earthquake rankings below.

What have been the most deadly earthquakes in human history? In the visualization we have mapped the top 10 rankings of known earthquakes which resulted in the largest number of deaths.3 This ranking is based on mortality estimates from the NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC).4

 Average Number of Deaths by Decade

In the chart we show global deaths from natural disasters since 1900, but rather than reporting annual deaths, we show the annual average by decade. The data for this chart can be found in the table presented here.

As we see, over 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.