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Natural disasters cost the earth
Last Updated: 2013-11-19 09:30 | CE.cn
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By Li Hongmei

Natural and weather disasters are costing nearly US$200 billion a year, four times more than in the 1980s, the World Bank said yesterday, warning climate change would drive the bill even higher.

"As the global climate continues to change, the costs and damages from more extreme weather related to a warming planet are growing," it said on the sidelines of UN climate talks in Warsaw.

Disasters cost nearly US$4 trillion over the last 30 years, about two-thirds of which was due to extreme storms, floods and drought, and killed more than 2.5 million people, it said in a cost analysis.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said Typhoon Haiyan, the most powerful typhoon ever to hit the Philippines, had "brought into sharp focus how climate change is intensifying the severity of extreme weather events."

"Such tragic events show that the world can no longer afford to put off action to slow greenhouse emissions, and help countries prepare for a world of greater climate and disaster risks," he said in the report.

The document included estimates of the cost from lives and jobs lost as well as damage to property and infrastructure.

In the 1980s, it said, the annual cost was about US$50 billion, quadrupling to US$200 billion per year in the last decade.

"Weather-related economic impacts are especially high in fast-growing, middle-income countries due to increasingly exposed, valuable assets," said the report.

In these economies, "the average impact of disasters equaled 1 percent of gross domestic product over the six years from 2001 to 2006, 10 times higher than the average for high-income countries."

Those down the ladder saw a correspondingly greater loss of GDP.

Hurricane Tomas wiped out about 43 percent of the GDP of St Lucia in 2010.

The 2008-11 drought in the Horn of Africa caused estimated losses of US$12.1 billion in Kenya alone.

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