The surprising reason fewer people are dying from extreme weather

From the wildfires that torched Los Angeles in January to the record-setting heat waves that cooked much of Europe in June, the first half of 2025 has been marked by what now seems like a new normal of ever more frequent extreme weather. It’s easy to feel that we live in a constant stream of weather disasters, with one ending only so another can begin, thanks largely to the amplifying effects of climate change.

Yet behind the catastrophic headlines is a much more positive story. For all of the floods and the fires and the storms and the cyclones, it turns out that globally, fewer people died from the direct effects of extreme weather globally through the first half of 2025 than any six-month period since reliable records began being kept decades ago.

About 2,200 people worldwide died in storms, floods, heat waves and other “weather‐climate” disasters in the first six months of the year, according to the risk consultancy company Aon’s midyear catastrophe report. They tallied 7,700 natural-hazard deaths overall, but if you take out the roughly 5,500 people who died in a single non-weather geological event — a major earthquake in Myanmar in March — you’re left with the smallest January-to-June weather death toll since we began keeping records. (Hat tip to Roger Pielke Jr., whose Substack post was where I first saw these figures.)

More than 2,000 deaths is still too many, and it doesn’t count more recent deadly disasters, like the terrible July floods in Texas’s Hill Country that killed at least 135 people. But it’s still remarkably low: The world has averaged 37,250 deaths in the first half of the year so far in the 21st century, and in previous centuries, far larger numbers of people often died because of extreme weather. Somehow, even as climate change has intensified many natural disasters and more people are living in harm’s way, the actual human toll from these catastrophes has been falling.

All of which raises two questions: How have we managed this? And will this trend continue even in an ever-warmer world?

I’ve been writing this newsletter for a few months now, and if I were to boil down its message into one phrase, it’d be this: Wow, the past was much worse than you think.

That’s certainly the case for deadly natural disasters and extreme weather. As you can see from the chart above, the first half of the 20th century regularly had years when the death rate from natural disasters was as high as 50 deaths per 100,000 people, and sometimes far higher. (In 2024, it was just 0.2 deaths per 100,000 people.) But annualized death rates hide just how bloody some of these events were.

In 1931, massive flooding in China’s Yangtze and Yellow River killed perhaps 4 million people due to drowning, disease, and starvation. In 1970, a huge cyclone in Bangladesh killed 500,000 people, and perhaps far more. An earthquake that hit Tokyo in 1923 killed at least 143,000 people. Here in the US, a hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900 killed as many as 12,000 people, making it the deadliest natural disaster in US history.

Until fairly recently, the Earth was a merciless killer. The 21st century has still been marked by the occasional mega-death toll disaster — though most of them have been earthquake related rather than weather-driven — but they’ve become far rarer. The frequency of storms and floods hasn’t abated. The difference is our ability to protect ourselves.

There’s a paradox in our improving response to natural disasters: Even as the deaths from extreme weather and other catastrophes have been falling, the cost of those events has been rising. The same Aon report that contained the good news about falling deaths also tallied up an estimated $162 billion in economic losses from global natural disasters — some $20 billion above the 21st century average.

These two trends are deeply connected. The single biggest factor behind the sharp increase in the economic costs of extreme weather is the simple fact that the world keeps getting richer and richer. That means more and more expensive property is at risk every time a hurricane spins up in the Atlantic or a flash flood swamps a major city. Yet at the same time, a richer society is one that can invest in warning systems and infrastructure adaptations that can and do vastly reduce the death toll from a disaster. Property in the path of a storm can’t move — but people, if they’re warned in time, can.

Take the terrible Los Angeles wildfires. The total economic impact from the fires may be as high as $131 billion, which would make it one of the costliest disasters in US history. That shouldn’t be surprising: The fires ripped through some of the most valuable real estate in the country. The death toll, by contrast, was 30 people. That makes it the second-deadliest wildfire in California history, but it still had a far lower human toll than wildfires from a hundred years ago or more, which killed hundreds and even thousands of people.

It’s a basic rule of disasters: A richer society has more to lose in property, but it also has the wealth to protect its people. And property, unlike people, can be restored.

From early warning text chains in Mozambique to cyclone shelters in Bangladesh to heat action plans in India, even some of the poorest countries in the world have built warning and response systems that can blunt the death toll of the worst extreme weather. The question for the rest of the decade is whether we can protect livelihoods as well as lives.

A new UN report estimates that when the full effects are counted, disasters cost the world over $2.3 trillion every year. We are getting brilliantly good at saving people; we have not yet figured out how to save their homes, crops and jobs. That will require the hard, unglamorous work of preparing for disasters before they happen. It’s an investment that should pay off — that same UN report calculates that every dollar spent on risk reduction leads to at least four dollars in avoided losses.

Extreme weather and natural disasters have always been with us and always will be, and climate change will mostly make them worse. But we shouldn’t lose sight of one of humanity’s greatest triumphs: We are learning, year by year, how not to die when the planet turns against us. The arc of human ingenuity still bends toward safety.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!