We Innovate Around Climate Risks
Climate-related deaths declined by 99.4 percent in the last 100 years.
Using the International Disaster Database, Bjorn Lomborg has reported a 99.4% reduction in the climate-related death rate from 1920s to 2022. This spectacular reduction occurred at the same time global population quadrupled. This trend in the drop in climate-related deaths is true for rich and poor countries alike. Adjusted for population, for every climate-related death in 2022, there were 167 each year in the 1920s. We are becoming around 5.15 percent safer every year from these kinds of deaths.
This decline occurred over a time period when the global population quadrupled from under 2 billion to over 8 billion inhabitants. While population was increasing around 1.4 percent a year, safety from climate was increasing 3.7 times faster at 5.15 percent.
Lomborg notes: “Will there continue to be dangerous climate and more deaths? Yes, but we must put these catastrophes into context with facts.” Our ability to adapt and thrive under negative climate conditions over the last 100 years has been astonishing.
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Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.
In some sense, the 24/7 news cycle as well the proliferation of social media and smartphones has greatly increased individual awareness of what is happening in the remote parts of the globe. This creates the impression that these events are more frequent than they were in the past, but this is not necessarily the case.