What are the deadliest natural disasters?

Natural disasters are getting more destructive and expensive. According to the UN, there is an increase in the intensity of climate and weather extremes.

They are also more frequent, and we have climate change to thank for that, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explained in their last report.

However, a positive data change is buried under the bad news: deaths caused by natural disasters are seven times lower than five decades ago. We are more prepared and have alert systems.

Natural disasters still take lives every year. However, some are more deadly than others and hit differently in every region. Here are a few examples with data from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium, collected by Our World in Data.

In the last decade, from 2010 to 2020, earthquakes were the deadliest type of natural disaster. Unpredictable, they are impossible to prepare for. Luckily early alert systems are more common now.

So far in this decade, the most significant dead toll is increasingly shifting to floods. It makes sense since weather-related disasters are becoming more common.

Floods went up from third to first place, but extreme temperatures have steadily held the second position in the last 20 years. Forty years ago, they were one of the least deadly disasters.

However, if we look only at high-income countries, extreme temperatures have become the deadliest disaster of this decade and have the second position in the list.

Low-to-middle-income countries had more than double the natural-disaster-related deaths of rich nations in the past decade. Floods are the number one among these territories.

Australia is outside the norm for rich countries, as floods have the highest death toll of natural disasters this decade. In the past decade, extreme temperatures were the worst kind.

In Canada, extreme temperatures have taken 20 times more lives in the last three years than all natural disasters in the past decade.

India's deathliest disasters are floods. They have taken thousands of lives between 2020 and 2022. Almost the same amount as they did in the past decade.

Malaysia has similar numbers, with floods killing more than triple in the past few years than all natural disasters in the past decade.

In New Zealand, the death toll from natural disasters is not even a tenth of what it was in the past decade when earthquakes and volcanic activity were the deadliest.

Sadly, the number in South Africa is the opposite: natural disasters are almost ten times deadlier than in the past decade. Floods are the worst type in the country.

As of 2022, Turkey's deadliest natural disasters are earthquakes, killing almost the same amount of people in the past decade as in the first two years of the current one. The data did not include the high life loss in the 2023 Turkey and Syria earthquake.

Extreme temperatures are responsible for practically all disaster-related deaths in the UK. Between 2020 and 2022, the country lost more lives than in the past four decades combined.

Extreme weather (cyclones, hurricanes, tornados, and heavy rains) is the number cause of disaster-related deaths in the US. It has taken more lives between 2020 and 2022 than in the past decade.

Despite the numbers showing a shift from unpredictable disasters like earthquakes to weather-related ones like floods at the top of the chart, it is early to tell how significant the change will be this decade.