A look back at 2013’s disasters
An anomalously low number of disasters struck last year
Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in November.
NASA, LAADS Web/Wikimedia Commons
Last year was not so bad overall for natural disasters. With 330 disasters worldwide, 2013 fell well below the yearly average of the preceding decade, 388, according to a report from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Brussels.
But it was a terrible year for the Philippines, which experienced the world’s most deadly disaster. Typhoon Haiyan struck in November, killing more than 7,300 people. June’s monsoon floods in India killed more than 6,000 people.
With 13 deaths, the tiny Caribbean nation St. Vincent and the Grenadines, home to around 103,000 people, was the only country to lose more than 0.01 percent of its population to disasters: It and St. Lucia experienced a flood in December.
