Between 1970 and 2019, more than 11,000 disasters were attributed to weather, climate, and water-related hazards, accounting for more than two million deaths and USD 3.64 trillion in losses.
• Reducing risk requires identifying and reducing the drivers of risk, which are related to poorly planned urban development, poor land-use planning, disease outbreaks, environmental degradation, poverty and inequality, and climate change.
• Careful planning, early warning systems, wetlands protection and restoration, investment in infrastructure including buildings and hospitals, awareness raising and education, and lowering greenhouse gas emissions can reduce disaster risk.
• Successful disaster risk reduction requires a combination of top-down, institutional changes and strategies and bottom-up, local, and community-based approaches.

In 2010, a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti. At 7.0 on the Richter scale, the capital, Port-au-Prince, was devastated (even the Presidential Palace was not spared), leaving more than 200,000 dead. Six weeks later, an earthquake that registered 8.8 on the Richter scale struck Chile, killing nearly 1,000 people, and causing significantly less damage. The Chilean earthquake was 500 times more powerful than the one in Haiti and the sixth strongest in recorded history, while the Haiti earthquake did not even make the US Geological Survey’s list of the 20 worst earthquakes on record. However, the damage and death in Haiti was still disproportionate, given the difference in severity of the two quakes.


In 2010, a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti. At 7.0 on the Richter scale, the capital, Port-au-Prince, was devastated (even the Presidential Palace was not spared), leaving more than 200,000 dead. Six weeks later, an earthquake that registered 8.8 on the Richter scale struck Chile, killing nearly 1,000 people, and causing significantly less damage. The Chilean earthquake was 500 times more powerful than the one in Haiti and the sixth strongest in recorded history, while the Haiti earthquake did not even make the US Geological Survey’s list of the 20 worst earthquakes on record. However, the damage and death in Haiti was still disproportionate, given the difference in severity of the two quakes.
Haiti earthquake
In 2010, a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti, devastating the capital, Port-au-Prince, leaving more than 200,000 dead. (Photo: Leah Gordon/iStock)

The reality is Chile was better prepared, with strict building codes enforced and government investment in sound infrastructure. Alternatively, Haiti lacked national building codes, enforcement, and the capacity to check building safety (Beam, 2010); building materials were of lower quality; and structures were built informally on slopes with “insufficient foundations or steel supports” (Chmutina et al., 2017). In Chile, marginalized communities were generally the most severely impacted; in Haiti, everyone was. The juxtaposition of the impacts and images of these events is jarring, illustrating that while the severity of the natural hazards themselves cannot be controlled, the degree of destruction and loss of life can.

Between 1998 and 2017, disasters from natural and man-made hazards killed 1.3 million people globally and impacted the lives of another 4.4 billion (UNDRR, 2020), with developing countries hit hardest. Disasters cost the global economy USD 520 billion annually (UNDRR, 2020). While some are geophysical, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, others, including floods, storms, droughts, and heatwaves, are climate related. Still others, like chemical spills, are the result of accidents caused by human error. READ FURTHER FROM THE SOURCES ABOVE