Hello and welcome to Business Weekly with Lucy Burton.

Today we'll be hearing from the World Meteorological Organisation,

who have been tracking weather-related disasters for the last 50 years.

We'll be looking at the economic and human cost of extreme weather

and asking if anything really can

be done to protect ourselves against it. COVID has claimed yet more victims in India. As the

economic hardship brought by the virus has seen a rise in the number of child brides forced into

marriage. Later in the show, we'll hear from a young girl who resisted her family's attempt

to marry her off to an older man. Plus, filming for the latest Mission Impossible film has been

put on hold multiple times over the last 18 months, thanks to COVID. Now Paramount Pictures

is suing its insurance company, saying the resulting payout doesn't begin to cover their losses. More on that later.

First, 11,000 reported disasters, 2 million deaths, 3.64 trillion dollar losses. They are the pretty

terrifying statistics published this week by the World Meteorological Organization.

The UN-based group has been looking at the last 50 years of weather

and says that disasters like hurricanes, floods and droughts have increased fivefold in that time.

Some of those disasters have been fairly recent,

and the last week alone there's been flooding in New York,

Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and a wildfire in California.

Well, the winds are growing more ferocious here in New Orleans.

If you just take a walk around the streets, you can see the debris from the storm already,

and hundreds of thousands have lost power.

There's more energy in the system. Whenever you have more energy in the system, you're adding

...