Tuguegarao City, Cagayan – The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has reported last September 3 that the Philippines in the last 50 years has 75% of fatalities caused by climate and weather disasters in the Southwest Pacific region.
The United Nations’ specialized agency bared that majority of the disasters that have caused the deaths were tropical cyclones in the Southwest Pacific from 1970 to 2019.
WMO mentioned that super typhoon “Yolanda” with international name Haiyan of 2013 has topped the list of the most deadly cataclysms listed with a death toll of 7,300 Filipinos.
The Philippines has been ranked no.1 with the deadliest disasters recorded in the said region of the Pacific.
Based on WMO’s report, there are 65,000 deaths recorded from the 1,407 disasters in 50 years that struck the Southwest Pacific region and 48,950 were recorded in the Philippines mainly from typhoons.
The country is noted to be a super highway for 20 tropical cyclones every year, leaving the WMO concerned over its location next to the Pacific Ocean and the worsening effects of climate change.
Studies on the trend of climate change’s effects in PH have noted typhoon “Uring” (Thelma) that ravaged Visayas in November 1991, taking 6,000 lives, typhoon “Pablo” (Bopha) back in 2012 also killed 1,901 people in Mindanao, tropical depression “Winnie”of 2004 also took 1,600 lives in Luzon bringing flash floods and landslides.
Some of the most devastating typhoons recorded in PH were flood inducing typhoons “Ondoy” of 2009, and “Ulysses” of 2020 bringing record flooding to NCR and Cagayan, typhoon “Lawin” (Haima) of 2016 has also been noted to be close to and or as strong as “Yolanda” which wreaked havoc in the northern valley despite the set of mountains protecting the area.
Over the past decade, disasters in the Southwest Pacific have also wrecked economies with $20 billion worth of cumulative loses.
The weather experts are now concerned over the trend of the typhoons bringing torrential rains with record-breaking volumes along with freak occurrences in ‘stronger’ super typhoons that exceed 300kph like “Yolanda” (Haiyan) and “Lawin” (Haima).
WMO also bared that early warning systems and improvements in disaster response have also been implemented over the past decade as counter measures to climate change and extreme weather in the future. TNF