In a fresh report, the UN weather and disaster risk reduction agencies found countries with poor early warning systems on average see, on average, eight times greater mortality from disasters than countries with strong measures.

Proper early warning systems for floods, droughts, heat waves, storms and other disasters allow for planning to minimize adverse impacts.

“Extreme weather events will happen. But they do not need to become deadly disasters,” UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said.

As the impacts of climate change were increasingly felt, the world was seeing more disasters that had “compounding and cascading impacts”, Thursday’s report said.

Countries should therefore be equipped with multi-hazard early warning systems, but only half of the world’s nations currently had such mechanisms in place, the report found.

Poorer regions, often the most vulnerable to climate shocks and natural disasters, were the worst equipped, with countries increasingly facing situations with multiple impacts. Fewer than half of the world’s least developed countries and only one-third of small island developing states had multi-hazard early warning systems, it said.

Mami Mizutori, head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, voiced alarm at the “significant gaps in protection”.

“This is a situation that needs to urgently change to save lives, livelihoods and assets,” she said.

As the threats rise, early warning systems have contributed toward significantly reducing disaster-related mortality.

The UN report showed that the number of people affected by disasters had nearly doubled from an average of 1,147 per 100,000 per year between 2005 and 2014 to 2,066 from 2012 to 2021.

At the same time, however, the annual number of people killed by or missing after disasters fell from 1.77 per 100,000 people in 2005-2014 to 0.84 in 2012-2021.

Mizutori pointed to the recent catastrophic monsoon floods in Pakistan, which submerged one-third of the country and left nearly 1,700 people dead.

“Despite this carnage, the death toll would have been much higher if not for early warning systems,” she said.

The UN wants all countries to put early warning systems in place within five years, and is due to present an action plan during November’s COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

“Those who have done the least to cause the climate crisis are paying the highest price,” Guterres said.

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