Do you have the feeling that 2021 was the year of flooding? Think again. We looked at the data for this year.
In Pakistan, the latest reports talk about eight million people displaced and high casualty numbers – fearing that the inhabitants will have to wait six months for the water to recede after the torrential monsoon rain hitting the country the past months. Gerida Birukila, UNICEF Pakistan, explains:
“Roads and bridges have been washed away;?I’ve just come from the field and the water is not going anywhere”
One in seven people in Pakistan have been affected with nearly one-third of the country under water.
In Brazilian Petrópolis, a tourist destination close to Rio de Janeiro, heavy rain was followed by mudslides that killed +200 people in February 2022. Deforestation, urbanization, and poorly drained neighbourhoods on the hillsides exacerbated this devastation.
In April 2022, disastrous floods stroke the Kwa-Zulu Nala Province of South Africa. The event severely damaged roads, health centers and schools leading to the death of 448 people, displacement of over 40,000 people and complete destruction of 12,000 houses.
Photo credit: UNICEF/Asad Zaidi - A flooded village in Matiari, in the Sindh province of Pakistan
Floods dominate the 2022 disaster map
Almost to half of the 187 disasters tracked this year by EM-DAT have been flood-related which also account for 64% of the total death toll and 87% of the total population affected by natural disaster. The floods have caused large damages including:
Especially events in Asia have driven up the flood disaster statistics to these elevated levels.
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Diagram: CRED Natural Hazards & Disasters occurrence - An overview of the first half of 2022
2022 at par or worse than ruinous 2021
Floods were frontpage news in Western media in 2021 due to namely:
With 223 events, flooding was indeed the dominating force among 2021 natural hazards surpassing the 2001-2020 average of 163 floods per year.
Diagram: Disaster occurrence in 2021 vs. 2001-2020 average according to CRED
Owing especially to the events in Germany and the US, the economic loss of flood events totaled USD 74 billion in 2021. It is likely that we will stay below that number in 2022 – natural disaster across types caused ‘only’ USD 41 billion in the first six months of the year.
However, due to the devastating floods seen this year to date we will end up with a skyrocketing number of casualties and people affected. In Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh alone more than 41 million persons have been affected by floods this year compared to a global figure of 29 million in all of 2021.
With a few months still to go of the year, it appears that 2022 will be a flood year as bad or worse than the annus horribilis of 2021.?
Photo credits: ? UNICEF/Loulou d'Aki Young boys and a man using crutches pass through the flooded streets of Nowshera Kalan, one of the worst affected area in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan.