​Natural Disasters Displaced Three Times More People Than War in 2013

"Natural hazard events" displace millions of people each year, and there's every reason to believe that the trend towards more and more people being displaced is only going to continue.

That's according to the latest Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre report, whose silver lining remains pretty grim: People displaced by natural disaster have at least lived through the natural disaster, but other than that, they've been pushed out of house and home.

According to the IDMC's report, in 2013, 22 million people were "displaced by disasters brought on by natural hazard events." These include weather-related events, like storms, floods, landslides, and also geological hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes.

Despite war in Syria, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and elsewhere, that 22-million-displaced figure is "triple the amount than by conflict in the same year," according to the IDMC. While it's no comfort to those who were forced out of their homes last year, 22 million is actually below average, and fewer people than the year before.

While it didn't attract as much attention in the United States, 2013 was also the year of the largest typhoon ever recorded. The largest displacement of the year came from Typhoon Haiyan, which displaced an estimated 4.1 million in the Philippines, whose capital city had just been hit by Typhoon Trami in September, as it tracked its way up to Vietnam, where it displaced another 800,000 people.

Couple that with an earthquake six months earlier, and the result is a million more people fleeing their homes in the Philippines than in Africa, the Americas, Europe and Oceania combined.

But it's not as though the US and its neighbors were immune to natural disasters either. Tornadoes in Oklahoma displaced over 200,000 people. Floods in Alberta, Canada displaced 120,000 people.

There are two reasons to believe that the risk of displacement is going to keep rising. You probably could have guessed that the report states that "changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events related to global climate change are expected to add to" the rising risk of displacement. But changing demographics also portend more big displacements in the future.

The big change is not just the global population, which has risen by a stunning 96 percent since the 70s. This growing global population is also becoming a more city-centric one. Urban populations have grown by 187 percent since the 70s, and in developing countries, they've grown by 326 percent. Unfortunately, many of these cities are already in areas vulnerable to natural disaster.

There are two ways of looking at urbanization, though: First, it will probably mean that there will be bigger "megadisasters" in the future. Out of 600 disasters last year, only 37 involved movements of more 100,000 people, but they accounted for half of all people displaced. On the other hand, a centralized population is easier to reach with early warning systems, emergency evacuations and, eventually, the emergency response.

These measures are already affecting outcomes after natural disasters, but displacement is often only the beginning of a response to a natural disaster. This report indicates that we're all going to have to be a lot more prepared to deal with everything that happens after.