21/7/2025–|Last update: 19:09 (Mecca time)
From Texas floods to California fires to Florida hurricanes, officials and journalists make tremendous efforts to limit the numbers of victims of these disasters, but they cannot accomplish the task as it should.
The phrase “high number of deaths” appears in many news headlines about disasters, but calculating the human losses caused by sudden floods, hurricanes, fires, heat waves and extremist climatic phenomena is not an easy thing as it may seem, according to a report by the American Point Institute specializing in the media.
The Institute’s report on the meteorological world and the weather historian Sean Potter as saying that the accurate reporting of the number of deaths in natural disasters is something that journalists and the media have always suffered, indicating that there are several reasons for that. Potter adds that among the difficulties facing the interruption of communications, the different methods of tracing and registering deaths, and the lack of coordination between the agencies concerned.
Peter Bringamman, director of international climate and environment news at the Associated Press, believes that the most important thing for journalists is to continue to ask questions about deaths and injuries, over and over, and request more details.
The Buenter Institute report indicates an investigation conducted in 2023 and reached the final stage of the prestigious Politzer Award, in which correspondents of the “The Belgiz” and “Daily Sun” (from Florida) found that the number of deaths in Florida associated with Hurricane Ian was at least 15% higher than the official total number.
The editor -in -chief of the “Daily Sun” newspaper, Bonita Miji, attributed these variations to the absence of unified standards for government agencies that track deaths. She said, “All of them are providing various reports, and there was a lot of overlap” in Hurricane Ian, explaining that “for example, a victim may be found in a boycott and transferred to another province, and sometimes none of the two provinces make a report, and sometimes they make a report.”
Peter Bringamman, director of international climate and environment news at the Associated Press, believes that the most important thing for journalists is to continue to ask questions about deaths and injuries, over and over, and request more details.
Bringaman said that the daily questions of journalists should be directed to several different people, from the field workers, to the local doctors and government officials.
“In Texas, if we hear from the authorities that a certain number of people who were in one of the camps were killed, then we heard another person saying something different, then we know that there is a variation, and we are conducting more investigations to know the truth.”
“When the numbers are very large so that each individual cannot be easily called, journalists must ask many officials who keep lists how they collect these lists, and if they have compared their observations with the notes of other officials,” commented Kelig McBraide, President of the Craig Neumark Ethics and Leadership Center.
Miaji expresses her doubts about field officials who are dead and said: “Maybe the best expressions you can use when talking about the numbers of disaster victims are (at least) or (according to my estimation).”
But why is the counting of deaths and the understanding of the human cost of disasters and how to report is important issues? “In most climate disasters, people die for various specific reasons, and it is very important to clarify these reasons, because this helps everyone to understand how to maintain their safety,” says McBraide.
She emphasized that knowing the causes is especially important to help people, societies and journalists prepare for the types of extremist weather phenomena that scientists say that the possibility of their occurrence increases with the continued greenhouse gas emissions in heating the atmosphere of the Earth.