A new United Nations report says the damages caused by extreme weather events and other so-called natural disasters have cost $2.9 trillion in economic losses over the last 20 years. This is professor Debarati Guha, who contributed to the report.

Debarati Guha: “We really need to have some disaster risk reduction and disaster risk mitigation, that is adaptation for the short term, for a 5-to-10-year period. Poor people in poor countries do not have 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. Most of those children will be dead. This is what is going to happen. Either they will be dead because of the catastrophe itself, or they will be dead because of the prevailing, persistent effect of malnutrition that comes along with these catastrophes, with the droughts and the floods.”

This follows Monday’s report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found humanity has only a dozen years to mitigate global warming and limit the scope of global catastrophe. We’ll have more on climate change and Hurricane Michael after headlines.