The latest, in chronological order, is Typhoon Haiyan, which has already caused thousands of deaths. The Philippines, along with Haiti and Pakistan, are among the three nations with the heaviest toll from natural disasters in 2012.
According to a study taken up by Les Echos and carried out by Germanwatch, a think tank partly dependent on the German government, such events had already killed over 1400 Filipinos last year, victims of Typhoon Bopha, and had cost over 1,2. $0,29 billion to the archipelago's economy, XNUMX% of its gross domestic product.
The calculations for the catastrophe that has just occurred still have to be done. What is known is that the numbers are much higher.
The state presided over by Benigno Aquino has not fared well in the last 20 years. Germanwatch ranks it among the 10 most affected countries in the period 1993-2012. To be precise, it is in seventh place. The top three are, in order, Honduras, Burma and Haiti.
The think tank also provided some global numbers: in the last two decades, climate catastrophes have caused 530 deaths and caused over 2500 trillion dollars in damage.
For the record, the 10 states that have suffered the greatest losses are all developing countries. Starting with Haiti, the poorest nation on the plain, devastated last year by hurricane Sandy, which also touched the coasts of the United States. The States, in this ranking, are in 31st place. An unenviable position, but one that shows how the economy of this country is more solid and has made it possible to better absorb a catastrophe that is still showing its signs.
The Germanwatch list, which took into consideration 180 nations, is based on a "global climate risk index", which aggregates the data on the rate of victims (number of deaths per 100 inhabitants) and the cost of economic damage compared to GDP
In the Germanwatch ranking, Italy – between floods and landslides – is in 21st place. It is preceded, in sixteenth place, by Portugal hit by the fires. Russia, increasingly affected by drought, is twenty-sixth.
