Natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes and droughts hit 18 million people in Latin America this year causing around 1,000 deaths and seven billion dollars' worth of damages, the UN said Thursday.
The high number of floods across the region accounted for around 80 percent of all damages, while landslides caused between 60-70 percent of the deaths, said Douglas Reiner, regional disaster response adviser for the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
"A trend that we see and that's important to note across the region is this increase in flood affectation," he told journalists.
"Droughts in our region have increased over the last 30 years some 300 percent, hurricanes fivefold and flooding almost 300 percent as well," he said.
Disasters invariably hit the poorest and most vulnerable people in the region and states must do more to address social inequalities which exacerbate their impact, warned Gerard Gomez, head of OCHA's regional office for America and the Caribbean.
"It's the region of the world with the greatest inequalities, it's where you have 75 percent of people concentrated in towns, it's where you have poor people who are totally invisible," Gomez said.
OCHA is working with a variety of bodies including governments, civil society and the private sector to try to ensure that the populations are better prepared to cope with disasters and their aftermath, he added.
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