Majority of natural disasters climate related, official says

Alex Kirby in Responding to Climate Change: A senior French political leader, foreign minister Laurent Fabius, has told an international conference on how to reduce the risk from natural disasters that 70% of them are now linked to climate change, twice as many as twenty years ago.

Fabius is the incoming president of this year’s round of negotiations by member states of the UN climate change convention, to take place in Paris in December. He said disaster risk reduction and the struggle against climate change went hand in hand: “It is necessary to tackle these problems together and not separately.”

He was speaking against the background of two events which occurred thousands of miles apart on 14 March, linked by nothing except tragic coincidence.

In the Japanese city of Sendai the third UN world conference on disaster risk reduction began a five-day meeting. In the South Pacific Cyclone Pam brought death and devastation to the 83-island nation of Vanuatu on a scale seldom recorded in the region.

Vivien Maidaborn, executive director of Unicef New Zealand, said the disaster could prove one of the worst in Pacific history. “The sheer force of the storm, combined with communities just not set up to withstand it, could have devastating results for thousands across the region,” she said.

A Unicef worker in Vanuatu described the cyclone as “15 to 30 minutes of absolute terror” for “everybody in this country” as it passed over....

Sendai's skyline at dawn, shot by Caveman2, Wikimedia Commons, public domain