DANI FREIDUS: Jury out on whether natural disasters are striking more frequently

Both of my paternal grandparents lived into their 80s. Yet both had siblings who passed away at a young age. At 13 my grandmother’s brother’s appendix burst, while my grandfather’s brother died aged just three from croup.

What is remarkable about this is how unremarkable these tragic events were. In 1920 a woman who had given birth to four children had only a 37% chance that all four would survive to adulthood. In the developed world that figure is now more than 95%. 

While jarring, these anecdotes and statistics surely surprise few people. The progress made in healthcare over the past century — a relatively short period in human history — borders on the miraculous. This story of medical achievement is well known, but while of comparable scope the advances made in other domains are less apparent in the common psych. 

Take climate change. I am not denying that Earth’s climate is changing, nor that global temperatures are rising in aggregate. The preponderance of evidence supports this. Yet barely a day goes by without our inboxes, feeds and media being filled with stories of climate catastrophes — all supposedly fuelled by our warming climate. This alarmism has created a narrative of not just impending — but of current — environmental doom. 

This feeling goes against the evidence and stems largely from our obsessive focus on the present. While few study history, many follow the news. We suffer from excessive recency bias. A major theme of this column is to try taking a bigger picture view; to attempt to look at the trends and unpassionately analyse the data.

Increasing insurance premiums 

So, are natural disasters occurring increasingly frequent, as the common narrative implies? The answer is unclear. Increasing insurance premiums would seem to suggest this, but premiums are subject to market forces and other influencing factors. There have also been studies — some subject to much criticism — that point in this direction.

However, this area is fraught with bias, implicit or otherwise. For example, deaths resulting from cold weather outnumber those from heat by a factor of more than 10, so all things being equal global warming will reduce direct temperature-related deaths. When was the last time you heard this fact? 

It is exceedingly difficult to accurately assess whether natural disasters have been increasing in frequency — particularly over a sufficiently long period. However, of far more significance is the severity of the effect of natural disasters in terms of human deaths. Here the trend is clear. 

Far fewer deaths in natural disasters  over 125 years

Over the past 125 years deaths from natural disasters peaked around 1940 at about 2-million a year. Since then, mostly through technological achievements, deaths have consistently decreased to about 200,000 a year. This is still too high, but let’s appreciate the tenfold reduction. 

But that’s not the whole story. In 1940 the world’s population was 2.3-million. So, as a proportion of the population at risk deaths from natural disasters have decreased by a factor of more than 30. When looking at deaths caused directly by extreme weather and temperatures, we also see a reduction on a percentage of population basis — albeit at a more modest factor of 2.5. 

Since the turn of the century the leading cause of climate-related mortality has been earthquakes. Our ability to predict the occurrence of earthquakes is limited — not that we’ve tried too hard. With room for improvements in building construction on fault lines, new initiatives to build prediction models should give us all reason to hope that death rates from earthquakes will also collapse. 

• Freidus, a consulting actuary, is cofounder of Five2two Analytics.