Bigger picture about weather disasters needs attention

Watching the news you get the sense that climate change is making the planet unlivable. We are bombarded with images of floods, droughts, storms and wildfires. We see not only deadly events nearby, but farflung disasters — when the pictures are scary enough.

Yet the impression this barrage of catastrophe gives us is wildly misleading and makes it harder to get climate change policy right. The numbers show climaterelated events such as floods, droughts, storms and wildfires aren’t killing more people. Actually, deaths have dropped precipitously — over the past decade climaterelated disasters have killed 98% fewer people than a century ago.

This should not be surprising, because the trend has been obvious for many decades, though it rarely gets reported. In the 1920s the average death toll from weather disasters was 485,000 a year. In 1921 the New York Herald headlined its coverage of droughts and famines across Europe: “Deaths for Millions in 1921’s Record Heat Wave”. Since then almost every decade has seen fewer deaths, with 168,000 dying on average each year in the 1960s and fewer than 9,000 a year in the most recent decade.

The huge drop in climaterelated deaths is revealed by the most respected international disaster database, the gold standard in measuring these effects. It’s reliable because extensive catastrophes have been documented consistently over the century, while smaller events were more likely to have been overlooked because there were fewer deaths and less advanced technology. That is why some media and climate campaigners increasingly point to a rise in reported events (rather than the declining death toll) as evidence that climate change is ravaging the planet.

But all of this increase has been in less serious events, whereas more deadly events are fewer and declining. The “rise” is due to technology and the global interconnectedness that allows for better reporting of ever smaller events, wherever they take place. This is clear because the increase is seen in all categories of disasters measured not only weather disasters, but geophysical disasters such as volcanoes and earthquakes, and technological disasters such as train derailings. Not even radical climate activists claim that climate change is causing more trains to derail, or more volcanoes to explode.

That is why fatalities provide a more robust measure. These are falling dramatically because richer, resilient societies are far better at protecting citizens than poorer, vulnerable ones.

One much-cited study shows that at the beginning of this century an average of 3.4million people experienced coastal flooding, causing $11bn in annual damages. About $13bn, or 0.05%, of global GDP was spent on coastal defences. By the end of this century there will be more people in harm’s way, and climate change will mean sea levels rise by up to a metre. If we do nothing and just keep coastal defences as they are today, vast areas of the planet will be routinely inundated, flooding 187-million people and causing damage of $55trillion annually, more than 5% of global GDP.

But richer societies will adapt before things get that bad — especially because the cost of adaptation is low compared to the potential damage, at just 0.005% of GDP. This sensible adaptation means despite higher sea levels fewer people than ever will be flooded.

By 2100 there will be just 15,000 people flooded every year. Even the combined cost of adaptation and climate damage will decrease to just 0.008% of GDP.

These facts help to show why seeing the bigger picture matters. Linking every disaster to climate change — and wrongly suggesting things are getting worse — makes us ignore practical, cost-effective solutions while the media focus our attention on costly climate policies that help little.

Enormously ambitious climate policies costing hundreds of trillions of dollars would cut the number of flooded people by the end of the century from 15,000 to about 10,000 per year. While adaptation saves almost all of the 3.4-million people flooded today, climate policy can at best save just 0.005-million.

The calculation is even starker for poor countries that have few resources and little disaster resilience. Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) suffered the largest recorded global death toll of 300,000 from a hurricane in 1970. Since then it has developed warning systems and shelters. Over the past decade, hurricane deaths have averaged just 160 a year, almost 2,000 times lower.

Weather disasters are just one aspect of climate change, which is a real global challenge. But when we are inundated with “weather porn” and miss the fact that deaths have dropped precipitously, we end up focusing on the least effective policies first.