According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), climate change has increased the frequency of extreme weather events, in particular droughts and heat waves, from 2011 to 2015.
From 1996 and 2015, there were about 11,000 extreme events that caused more than half a million deaths around the world, as stated in the report.
Record temperatures in the United States in 2012 and in Australia in 2013, hot summers in East Asia and Western Europe in 2013, heat record in Argentina in December 2013: all phenomena whose probability strongly increased due to climate change.
Studies that examine the connection between extreme events and climate change are increasingly numerous and most of them are published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Although they admit that it is impossible to attribute a particular event to climate change, the work of climatologists show that extreme events will be more numerous as climate change will increase.
The effects of climate change (increase in global average temperature in both, continents and oceans, raising sea levels, melting of polar ice) increased risks of extreme events,
declared Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the WMO.
Africa is particularly vulnerable to the impact of climate change,
stated Soenke Kreft, senior author of the 12th annual Climate Risk Index, published in Morocco.
Poor countries are usually the most exposed to the ravages of storms, extreme heat, floods or drought.
Over the past two decades, the most affected countries were Honduras, Myanmar and Haiti. The Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam and Thailand were also very affected from a human and economic point of view.