GNV News, June 4, 2025

On May 27, 2025, a report by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) found that from 2001 to 2020, the average annual direct losses from disasters worldwide amounted to about US$200 billion. These losses have been increasing year by year, nearly tripling from roughly US$70–80 billion during 1970–2000. It also found that when indirect losses are added, the total reaches about US$2.29 trillion. This is roughly ten times the direct losses, prompting claims that the impacts of disasters are being underestimated.

Previous estimates did not include impacts on daily life, health, and ecosystems in the calculations. However, because indirect losses from disasters are overwhelmingly greater than direct losses, this led to underestimation. Among these, environmental impacts, including on ecosystems, have risen sharply in recent years; comparing 2013 and 2023 shows a more than threefold difference.

The economic burden of disasters has grown particularly large in low-income countries. Take 2023 as an example. The region with the highest total disaster losses worldwide was North America, and the amount was US$69.6 billion, but this figure amounted to only 0.23% of the region’s GDP. By contrast, looking at the Micronesia region, which consists of low-income countries, the US$4.3 billion in natural disaster losses accounted for nearly half of its GDP, it was also revealed. In particular, low-income countries, compared with high-income countries, tend to invest their limited budgets and resources in services that people can benefit from immediately, such as healthcare and education, rather than in long-term disaster measures, leaving them even more severely affected by disasters. Disasters can also worsen poverty. Furthermore, in such countries, governance challenges—such as political corruption within public institutions and weak policy implementation—appear to be compounding the damage.

According to UNDRR, to halt the current trend of rising losses, governments need to allocate budgets to disaster risk reduction, and the public and private sectors should work together to expand insurance coverage, among other measures.

Learn more about low-income countries and climate change → “A new ‘apartheid’ created by climate change”

Learn more about international disaster reporting in Japan → “When you think of disasters, earthquakes? Japan’s distorted ‘image of disaster’”

A building damaged by a typhoon that struck Micronesia in 2015 (Photo: USAID Asia / Flickr [CC BY-NC 2.0])