In recent years, storms, floods, heat waves and droughts have claimed many lives and caused significant economic damage. A new study provides a global picture of the rising costs directly attributable to human-induced global warming.
While the figure varies significantly from year to year, extreme weather events caused an average of $140 billion in damage per year from 2000 to 2019. The latest data puts the cost at $280 billion in 2022. Lack of data, especially in low-income countries, means the figures are seriously underestimated, the researchers said. Additional climate costs, such as reductions in crop yields and sea level rise, were also not included.
Overall climate costs were highest in 2003, when a heatwave hit Europe. Costs were also high when Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar in 2008, when drought hit Somalia in 2010 and when the heatwave hit Russia. Property damage was higher in 2005 and 2017, when hurricanes hit the US, where property values are high.
Researchers combined data on how much global warming has exacerbated extreme weather events with economic data on losses to create estimates. The study also revealed that the number of people affected by extreme weather events amounted to 1.2 billion over a 20-year period.
According to the study, two-thirds of damage costs are attributable to loss of life and one-third to property losses. Storms such as Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Nargis were responsible for two-thirds of climate costs, while heatwaves accounted for of costs and floods and droughts for of costs.
The researchers said their method could be used to calculate how much funding is needed for the loss and damage fund set up at the UN climate summit in 2022 to compensate for damage caused by extreme weather events in poor countries.
Professor Ilan Noy of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, who led the study with colleague Rebecca Newman, said: “First of all, $140 billion a year is a big number. ”Secondly, when you compare this to the standard measure of the cost of climate change (using computer models), it seems to underestimate the impact of climate change."
“It shows that our headline figure of $140 billion is a significant understatement,” Noy said, adding that there are many extreme weather events for which there is no data on the number of people killed or economic damage. For example, heatwave mortality data is only available in Europe, he said: “We have no idea how many people have died from heatwaves in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.”