UN official highlights how better preparation has shrunk disaster deaths despite worsening climate

As climate change makes disasters such as cyclones, floods and droughts more intense, more frequent and striking more places, fewer people are dying from those catastrophes globally because of better warning, planning and resilience, a top United Nations official said.

The world hasn’t really noticed how the type of storms that once killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people now only claim handfuls of lives, new United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Kamal Kishore, who heads the UN’s office for disaster risk reduction told The Associated Press. But he said much more needs to be done to keep these disasters from pushing people into abject poverty.

“Fewer people are dying of disasters and if you look at that as a proportion of total population, it’s even fewer,” Kishore said in his first interview since taking office in mid-May. “We often take for granted the progress that we’ve made.”