NPR

U.N. Summit: Climate-Related Disasters Getting Worse, Funds To Help Falling Short

Low- and middle-income nations are still tens of billions of dollars a year short for recovery from the increasing number of disasters, according to a new report.
A man stands in his wrecked home in Macomia, Mozambique, after Cyclone Kenneth in April. It was the second intense cyclone to strike the country in six weeks.

In March, when Cyclone Idai made landfall in central Mozambique and became one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the country's history, Jose Mucote was ready.

He runs a local humanitarian aid nonprofit and had been working since 2008 to set up a cyclone response system in the town of Estaquinha that included solar-powered radios, a warehouse stocked with emergency supplies and an evacuation boat.

Within days of the storm, Mucote's group had helped evacuate more than 1,000 people from the town, even as hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans elsewhere in the country were stranded amid floodwaters while first responders struggled to reach them. Six months later, many of those families remain in).

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