Africa is the region most affected by extreme weather

Nearly half of the countries most severely affected by extreme weather are on the African continent, according to a report published Tuesday in Marrakech during the UN Climate Conference (COP22), reports AFP Tuesday.

Africa is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according to Srinke Kreft, the lead author of the 12th century 'annual climate risk index', published by the Germanwatch NGO. In general, poor countries are most exposed to the ravages caused by storms, heat waves, floods and droughts, phenomena whose intensity and frequency increase due to the effect of global warming.

Liz Gallagher, a climate policy expert at environmental think-tank E3G, says: “We will definitely see real decisions at COP22, as it is not a terribly high-stakes COP — which means that there aren’t any huge grand bargains that people are going to die in a ditch over, so we will certainly see decisions…It is the quality and the detail that is at stake.”

"The distribution of weather events is not fair," says Kreft, indicating that the developing countries are responsible, in terms of history, for only a very small extent of the emission of greenhouse gas. The Germanwatch index centralizes extreme events in 180 countries, in particular on the basis of German insurer MunichRe.

In 2015, the ten most affected states were: Mozambique, Dominican Republic, Malawi, India, Vanuatu, Myanmar, Bahamas, Ghana, Madagascar and Chile. From 1996 to 2015, nearly 11,000 episodes of extreme weather killed more than half a million people worldwide, according to the report. Storms, heat waves and floods have caused damage of more than 3,000 billion dollars in the mentioned period. During the two decades, the most affected countries were: Honduras, Haiti and Burma. Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan. Vietnam and Thailand were also affected, both in terms of victims and financially. Last year, the report found that states hit by extreme weather in 2014 were Serbia, Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina.