Natural disaster death toll: how does it compare to death by human hands?
March 20th, 2011
Introduction
I saw a Youtube video today that a friend posted on Facebook of the Japan earthquake tsunami. The destruction is terrifying and surreal. This kind of thing makes you simultaneously feel everything and nothing all at once.
The earthquake video made me wonder how many people really have died in the last few years from natural disasters? It seems like the earth is detonating with volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides and the list goes on. What is going on?
Then my science brain started saying, ‘You know this is the TV, and your emotions are biasing the truth. The truth is people have done a lot more disaster than natural forces. Just think about it, war, genocide…’. At this type of moment I know of one cure, Wikipedia.
Question
How do the number of natural disaster deaths and other “unnatural” but nature related deaths (i.e. famine and pandemic) compare to the death caused by human hands like genocide and war in the last 100 years?
Methods and results
I went to Wikipedia and made calculations for the cause for death since the year 1900 in the following categories a) natural disaster, b) genocide, c) war, d) famine, e) pandemic (summary of results in table below and pie chart above). These results are based on the average of the high and low death toll estimated in each category (click [here] to download the complete spreadsheet including expanded information in each category).
| Cause for death | Death toll (average from Wikipedia) |
Percent of total (%) |
| Natural disaster | 3,439,420 | 0.31 |
| Genocide | 25,341,509 | 2.28 |
| Famine | 86,113,000 | 7.76 |
| War | 118,857,500 | 10.71 |
| Pandemic | 876,250,000 | 78.94 |
| Total | 1,110,001,429 |
Discussion
The results are discussed in terms of two major divisions: 1) death due to events beyond our control and 2) death due to events within our control. This is a crude division considering that each individual event could be more or less in our control (i.e. famine could be connected to climate change or also political regimes).
Death due to events beyond our control (pandemic / famine / disaster). Surprisingly, death due to natural disaster only makes up approximately 0.3% of the death in the examined categories since 1900. Pandemics are the overwhelming cause for death in the last century (78%). Famine was another major factor that I didn’t initially consider (7.7%), yet it has resulted in 25 times more death than natural disaster.
Death due to events within our control (war / genocide). In total, war and genocide made up 12% of deaths. War caused 10 times as much death as genocide.
Conclusion
This study indicates that pandemics are overwhelmingly the greatest factor for death in the last century. One interesting question is to determine the percentage of money spent in each category and compare it to the death percentage for each category. Do we spend money in the wisest way to reduce death? If not, what type of algorithm would you use to determine how to spend money in each category? For example, this algorithm might take into account a weighting factor for how much control we have over the death in each category on a case by case basis. Granted, there is never enough aid to cover all of this suffering and there is no perfect solution for a system this complex.
*These calculations have been done carefully, but there is a possibility that I could have made a mistake or that the information on Wikipedia was incorrect. If you notice anything wrong, please let me know and I will make corrections.