#6. South Asia Floods
Subject to the monsoon rains, home to billions, South Asia is forever teetering between too little water and too much of it. This summer it was the latter. A series of abnormal monsoon rains in northern India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh in July and August eventually led to what UNICEF called "the worst flood in living memory." By mid-August some 30 million people across the region had been displaced, and more than 2,000 would die in the floods. Damages were estimated to be at least $120 million, which was less a measure of the severity of the floods than the utter poverty of affected areas.