Tackling Disasters Vital to End Poverty: World Bank Chief

In the past 30 years, the world has lost more than 2.5 million people and almost $4 trillion because of natural disasters, the president of the World Bank said on Friday as governments prepare to adopt a new global plan to reduce disaster risk.

Speaking in Tokyo on his way to the northeastern city of Sendai, where a U.N. conference aims to finalize the plan, Jim Yong Kim said the 2010 earthquake in Haiti destroyed more than a decade of growth in the country, and in 2013, Typhoon Haiyan pushed nearly half a million Filipino households into poverty.

Over the last 16 months, the Ebola epidemic killed nearly 10,000 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and caused those countries' growth rates to plunge from some of the highest in the world to expected levels near or below zero, the World Bank chief said.

"To end poverty, we must continue to expand our understanding of how to manage disasters and deploy this knowledge aggressively," Kim said in prepared remarks to journalists.

Due to global warming, the frequency, intensity and duration of extreme weather events like droughts will increase, he warned, making disaster risk "worse in the future".

The conference tasked with agreeing the new disaster reduction plan opens on Saturday and will be attended by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and 20 heads of state and government, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

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