麻豆社

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said recently: 鈥渢he number of natural disasters has nearly quadrupled since 1970.鈥�

It was widely reported in the news.

The claim comes from a briefing paper on climate change from 10 years ago by Oxfam which claimed that natural disasters have quadrupled in the 20 years running up to 2007.

Oxfam got the figures from a database of disasters held by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of disasters (CRED) in Belgium.

The database shows that in 1986 there were 150 recorded disasters and 401 in 2006 鈥� that is a sharp increase, but it has not quadrupled. Also since then the rate of disasters has fallen.

Why recorded disasters increased

Debbi Guha Sapir of CRED says the number of recorded disasters went gone up because they are better reported.

CRED has had to collate historical data for earlier decades and it is not as comprehensive as in more recent times.

Also technology has allowed more disasters to reach public attention.

And now the disasters are going down, but the deaths are going up

2006 was a high point in the data for number of disasters, with the average number over the last five years coming in at 340.

But while the events are down, the number of deaths are up.

Before last year鈥檚 hurricanes it had been over 12 years since a category 5 hurricane had hit the continental United States.

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