A new set of statistics published on January 18, 2012 by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), shows that major earthquakes claimed thousands of lives and impacted millions of people in both 2010 and 2011.

 The statistics show that 20,943 people lost their lives in earthquakes during 2011, the majority of whom were as the result of the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan. In 2010, over 220,000 people died as a result of the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12.