“This is not about the future, this is about today,” said Mami
Mizutori, the UN secretary general’s special representative on disaster
risk reduction. Part of the problem is that, apart from high-profile
events like the twin cyclones that hit Mozambique and the killer drought in India,
most of the “lower-impact events” causing death, displacement, and
suffering around the world generate few headlines—even though their
frequency is growing much faster than scientists predicted.