For the 2020 World Disasters Report,Footnote ¹ the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) compiled and analyzed disaster data since the 1960s, looking globally at the number and type of disasters, the number of people affected and how and where and reviewing how this has changed over time. When looking at the trends in disaster data, the impact of climate crisis is clear.

In 2019 alone, 77 percent of all disasters that were triggered by natural hazards were classified as climate or weather related. Out of a total of 97.6 million people that were affected by disasters triggered by natural hazards, 97 percent were impacted by climate and weather-related disasters. It is not only poorer countries that are affected by these events. In Europe in 2019 three different heatwave events killed over 3,400 people.

The number of disasters triggered by extreme weather- and climate-related events has been increasing since the 1960s, and has risen almost 35 percent since the 1990s. The proportion of disasters attributable to climate and extreme weather events has also increased significantly during this time. Even when the total number of disasters apparently flattened in the last two decades, the proportion attributable to climate and extreme weather events, such as floods, storms, and heatwaves, continued to rise, from 76 percent of all disasters during the 2000s to 83 percent in the 2010s.

These climate- and weather- related disasters have claimed more than 410,000 lives in the past ten years, the vast majority in low- and middle-income countries. A further 1.7 billion people around the world have been affected by climate and weather-related disasters during the past decade. Overall, extreme climate and weather-related events are more common, more severe and they occur in places they have not before. And often these events are happening simultaneously across the world. During the first six months of the pandemic there were well over one hundred disasters, affecting over fifty million people. Ninety-seven percent of those affected were affected by climate- and weather-related disasters.

One example is western Uganda where in May 2020 heavy rains caused four rivers to burst their banks, destroying homes, a hydroelectric power station, and a hospital, burying villages in mud and displacing thousands of people. Floods and landslides affected Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda, killing close to three hundred people and displacing half a million more across the three countries. The combination of the floods and a locust invasion impacted food security and livelihoods and left nearly 2.6 million people severely food insecure in at least eight countries. This has demonstrated the incredible impact of multiple simultaneous crises, a sign of what we need to be prepared for if we are to effectively tackle the climate crisis.

Not only do we know that the percentage of climate- and weather-related events has increased over the past, scientists predict more extreme climate- and weather-related events to further increase in number, intensity, and variability in the future. For instance, 147 million people may be at risk of flooding by 2030. We expect to see an increased intensity of tropical cyclones, with more category 4 and 5 storms by the end of the twenty-first century. Nearly 190 million people now occupy land below projected high tide lines for 2100. Forty-eight percent of the global population may be exposed to extreme heat (temperatures above 37°C) for at least twenty days every year by 2100.

However, there is some good news—which is that we can act to save lives and livelihoods in the face of the climate crisis. One aspect of this is mitigation—reducing the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so that climate change does not get worse. However, a certain amount of change is already inevitable, and therefore we need to adapt and change what we do before, during and after crises.

We know adaptation/disaster risk reduction action works. Overall deaths dropped from 1.75 million in the 1960s to less than 0.75 million in the last decade. This is particularly significant given the number of disasters has increased approximately six times since the 1960s and the world population has at the same time more than doubled (from three billion in the 1960s to 7.8 billion in 2020). While there are many reasons for this, a part of this is our investment in disaster risk reduction, a crucial part of climate adaptation.

But we need to do better at ensuring we are helping the most vulnerable. This includes practical action, investment, having the right regulatory frameworks and implementing in the right way. Our analysis shows that the money that is intended to protect people from the climate crisis is not always reaching those people who are in greatest need. Instead, many people are still being left behind.

We combined the two main indexes that rank countries by climate and disaster risk to come up with a list of those countries that are highly vulnerable to climate change. In particular we used the ND-GAIN index which quantifies national vulnerability to climate disruptions. In this case vulnerability is calculated as a combination of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, and the index also looks at readiness to adapt based on economic, governance, and social components. This is the index most commonly used in the climate world. We also used the INFORM index which quantifies national disaster risk based on historical exposure to hazards, vulnerability, and coping capacity. Based on these sources we identified eight countries that are very-highly vulnerable and another sixty that are highly vulnerable.

We discovered that per capital funding climate adaptation averaged only ninety cents per person in very high vulnerability countries, and 1.8 USD per person in high vulnerability countries. In total, thirty-eight high vulnerability countries (out of sixty) and five very high vulnerability countries (out of eight) received less than $1 per person in climate adaptation funding. Disaster risk reduction funding (which is substantially less overall) showed a similar breakdown. Somalia, the most vulnerable, ranks only seventy-first per person for climate change adaptation funding disbursements, whilst Afghanistan, the second most vulnerable comes in eighty-second. Many of those not receiving funding are fragile—places hard to work in.

This is an important reminder that in all we do we need to double our efforts in the most vulnerable countries and communities that are currently being left behind.