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8 mln deaths from natural disasters since 1900: study

Xinhua, April 19, 2016 Adjust font size:

Natural disasters have killed more than eight million people globally and caused damage of over seven trillion dollars since the beginning of the 20th century, according to a study by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) published on Monday.

The KIT geophysicist James Daniell collected data on more than 35,000 disasters from 1900 until 2015 in his database, Catdat.

According to the Catdat database, the worst disaster in recent times was the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 which claimed the lives of 230,000.

However, the biggest natural disaster in terms of financial losses was the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan in 2011 which destroyed 335 billion U.S. dollars worth of property.

Over the entire period since 1900, half of the victims died in floods, but thanks to improved preventive measures and risk analysis, this has decreased.

Since 1960, earthquakes have caused most deaths, according to Daniell. Overall, earthquakes killed 2.32 million people worldwide from 1900 to 2015. Endit