2026-02-09 シカゴ大学（UChicago）
＜関連情報＞
- https://news.uchicago.edu/story/what-decades-data-reveal-about-climate-disaster-deaths
- https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2025GL119218
気候災害による死亡率：傾向と外れ値の診断 Climate Hazard Mortality: Diagnosing Trends and Outliers
B. B. Cael
Geophysical Research Letters Published: 04 December 2025
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL119218
Abstract
Climate hazards like floods and heatwaves kill many people; their deadliness may shift with the frequency or intensity of extreme weather, population growth, or migration. Assessing preparedness and projections requires understanding historical mortality trends, though this is challenging due to the variability in, and complex causal chains of, events’ deadliness. This study diagnoses mortality trends in EM-DAT, the largest public disaster mortality database, using a nonstationary Poisson-Generalized Pareto statistical model. Several trends in frequency and/or intensity of deadly hazards are identified and discussed. Most notably, Asian floods and storms became less deadly and frequent due to reduced vulnerability via increased adaptive capacity, which is conservatively estimated to have saved 350,000 (95% CI: 220,000–560,000) lives. Storm Daniel in 2023 is also found to be a once-in-two-centuries outlier event indeadliness for an African flood or storm. These results highlight the importance of continued disaster monitoring as climate hazard mortality evolves.
Plain Language Summary
Climate hazards such as floods, storms, and extreme temperatures kill many people around the world each year. These events may become more or less deadly over time due to a combination of climate change, population growth, and shifts in how vulnerable populations are to these hazards. For various applications it is valuable to identify trends in the deadliness of climate hazards, but these trends are obscured by substantial variability. This study looks at nearly 2,000 of the deadliest climate hazard events worldwide since 1988 to assess whether, how, and why their deadliness is changing. It is found Asian floods and storms have become less deadly, probably due to reduced vulnerability via improved infrastructure and emergency responses, which are estimated to have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. In contrast, deadly floods in Africa have become more frequent because of population growth. The extremely deadly Storm Daniel is also quantified as a once-in-centuries outlier event among African floods and storms. As previously reported, European temperature extremes have become deadlier, due to heatwaves becoming more prevalent relative to cold snaps. These results highlight the importance of continued monitoring of the impacts of climate hazards, to assess and help improve disaster preparedness worldwide.
Key Points
- Mortality trends and outliers are identified and discussed for Asian floods and storms, African floods, and European temperature extremes
- The 2023 Mediterranean cyclone Storm Daniel was a once-in-centuries event in terms of its deadliness among African floods and storms
- Development in Asia since 1988 reduced deaths from floods and storms by 350,000 (95% CI: 220,000–560,000) lives
