The European Environment Agency (EEA) has published a report on Thursday (February 3, 2022) in which it stated that extreme climate events such as floods, heatwaves, and other severe weather in Europe had taken over 141,000 lives. The natural calamities have caused a lot of destruction in the country, which further claimed the loss of €50bn over the past 40 years.
The report also shows that about 3% of the total number of small extreme weather events is only responsible for financial damages of about 60% between 1980-2020.
In Europe, heatwaves account for 91 per cent of human deaths, with the heatwave in the summer of 2003 killing about 80,000 people.
Meanwhile, floods were the most expensive disasters in terms of money, accounting for 44 per cent of the overall expense, ahead of storms (34%).
In its studies, EEA suggested many better strategies to deal with such instances. According to the World Meteorological Organization, weather-related disasters have increased globally over the last 50 years by causing significant damages but fewer deaths.
In addition, Germany has suffered the highest losses accounting for 107 million euros and reported around 41,500 victims over the past four decades, followed by France; the calamities have caused the loss of 99 billion euros in damages and 26,700 deaths. On the other hand, Italy has lost 90 billion euros 21,600 deaths respectively.
These data do not include natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because they are not meteorological.
NOAA, a US weather agency, also released a similar report on the US. The agency states that the USA has experienced 310 extreme weather and climate disasters since 1980, with total damage exceeding $2,155 billion.
However, the data published by the EEA does not show a clear picture of the rise in losses from the impact of the climatic crisis.
Vanneuvill, an expert of EEA, also warned that the climatic models in the continent predict severe events by including floods, storms, droughts, landslides and forest fires.
