A new scientific study has confirmed what GWPF reports and statements have emphasized for some time: Natural and climate-related disasters have been declining rather than increasing during the 21st century. [emphasis, links added]
For years, international agencies such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the International Red Cross (IFRC) have been issuing reports claiming that climate-related disasters are currently escalating (Weather, climate disasters surge fivefold in 50 years, says UN report).
For years, the GWPF has been pointing out that such claims are wrong and contradicted by empirical data.
The UN agencies’ misleading claims arise from a failure to account for the major increase in disaster reporting engendered by the arrival of new technologies since the 1970s.
The annual number of climate-related disasters has trended downwards over the last 20+ years.
The number of people killed by natural and climate-related disasters has also been falling steadily over the past 120 years.
In a new study analyzing temporal trends in the number of natural disasters reported since 1900, two Italian scientists confirm that the 21st century has seen “a decreasing trend to 2022” which is “characterized by a significant decline in number of [disaster] events…”
“The statement that we are facing an increasing trend of natural disasters, as claimed in the three official reports by UNDRR and FAO on the basis of the same EM-DAT dataset […] are not supported by data” (Gianluca Alimonti & Luigi Mariani (2024) Environmental Hazards, 23:2, 186-202).
The authors emphasize that the empirical data:
“…sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by two UN bodies (FAO and UNDRR), which predict an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming. Our analyses strongly refute this assertion as well as extrapolations published by UNDRR based on this claim.”
In their conclusion, the scientists emphasize that they:
“…are concerned about the misrepresentation of the natural disaster trend because such claims have been uncritically broadcast by many different media and by FAO itself, thereby deforming the perception of the public on the risk of natural disasters… Misinterpreting the trend of natural disasters is a very serious matter because it exposes the world population to the risk of inconsistent policies at both a national and an international level, thereby wasting resources or diverting them from the resolution of much more concrete problems.”
Dr Ralph Alexander who has authored a series of critiques of erroneous climate disaster claims said:
“The new study by Alimonti and Mariani vindicates what we said in a GWPF report three years ago – climate-related disasters are not on the rise, despite global warming. Claims to the contrary have been made for years by several international agencies.
“Yet, these agencies failed to recognize that the apparent increase in natural disasters since the 1970s simply reflects a major increase in disaster reporting due to new technology.”
GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said:
“There is a famous saying that sums up the GWPF’s efforts to set the record straight on disaster trends and climate disasters: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they join you.”
Statistical records of just about anything in history should be relevant to telling us what we are doing right. That’s reality. In my personal experiences, which cover my life from what I can remember in the mid 1950’s – I was born in 1948, to today, life is so much less dangerous from natural events.
We can have lots of rain, droughts, you name it but we are so well organised, the majority of people are safe from harm. We build better homes today to protect people from all sorts of natural events that we cannot prevent. We have adapted and that’s what we seem to be doing on a continual basis.
Those who seek to mislead or just scare people are fools because most of us just look at what we have experienced and we know those people are talking total crap.