Extreme weather will displace 200 million people within 20 years, disaster relief charity CEO warns

Catastrophic flooding displaced more than 40,000 people in South Africa in April. On Monday afternoon, a record-breaking hurricane killed at least 11 people in Mexico. And according to one disaster relief organization, the impacts of extreme weather events such as these are only going to get worse.

Sanj Srikanthan, CEO of the international group ShelterBox, which provides essentials to people impacted by conflict and natural disasters, told Reuters that,

on average, roughly 11 million people have lost their homes every year over the last five years because of extreme weather. That average was pulled from data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, which saw the annual numbers jump from 7.5 million in 2017 to 14.6 million in 2020 before dropping down to 11.5 million in 2021.

“So if you extrapolate that over the next 20 years, 200 million people are going to lose their homes,” Srikanthan said. “And that’s obviously conservative because that number is increasing and the issue is that the system that we exist in, ShelterBox, to respond to these kind of disasters wasn’t designed for this kind of volume….READ ON

Why this Atlantic hurricane season is predicted to be unusually stormy

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1st until November 30th—the months during which tropical storms are most likely to form and wreak havoc on their roughly westerly course through the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

In the past few years it has been common for the first storms to appear before the season officially opens; this year none has, and none looks likely to form in the Atlantic in coming days, though the remnants of a Pacific storm currently passing over Mexico could become a tropical storm again when they reach the Gulf. Read nothing into this slow start. Most forecasters predict the season will be a dangerous one…READ ON