2.3.2Active indicatorLethality of Extreme Weather Events
2.1Assessment and planning of health adaptation
2.2Enabling conditions, adaptation delivery, and implementation
2.3Vulnerabilities, health risk, and resilience to climate change
Indicator 2.3.2 · Adaptation
Lethality of Extreme Weather Events
Climate change is increasing the frequency, intensity, and duration of many extreme weather events, including droughts, storms, wildfires, floods, and extreme temperatures, with major consequences for human health. Effective preparedness and adaptation can reduce the risk of death even as exposure to these hazards increases. This indicator tracks mortality among people affected by climate-related extreme weather events and the proportion of events associated with deaths.
Headline finding
Between 2016 and 2025, the number of people affected per storm or flood event increased by 33%. Importantly, the annual increase was 8.6% lower in countries with heat early warning systems than in those without, underscoring the value of preparedness in protecting populations.
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Figure 1
Lethality of Extreme Weather Events
Average annual deaths per 100,000 people or affected people per 100,000 people from storms and floods, from 2006 to 2025, for countries with and without a health early warning system (HEWS). Results can be explored by country and world, and viewed as a trend, map, or grouped bar chart.
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Figure 2
Lethality of Extreme Weather Events
Average annual deaths per 100,000 people or affected people per 100,000 people from storms and floods, presented for HDI groups, WHO regions, and Lancet Countdown regions, separately for countries that declared and did not declare a health early warning system (HEWS). Results are available for two periods—2006 to 2015 and 2016 to 2025—and are displayed as rankings by grouping.
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About this indicator
Description
This indicator captures the number of occurrences of weather-related disasters (drought, storms, wildfires, floods and extreme temperatures), the number of people affected in each disaster, and the lethality of these events.
Data downloads
Caveats
There is a possible bias in missing some disaster events because of under-reporting. Similarly, there are likely biases in how countries report both the number of deaths and people affected. Numbers of deaths may not include mortality from the cascading risks of natural disasters that occur as a result of longer causal chains from the hazard. Estimates of the numbers of people affected have different biases for different countries because of how the concept of “affected people” is defined. The combination of two different datasets may not be fully compatible as the HEWS from the 2021 WHO survey does not have a clear starting implementation year.
Data sources
- EM-DAT at the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Available from: https://public.emdat.be/
- World Bank, World Development Indicators. Population, total. Available from: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL
- 2021 WHO Health and Climate Change Global Survey.