CLIMATE CHANGE IS COSTING THE EARTH
Hundreds of billions spent on weather disaster damage
CLIMATE change-related extreme weather hit every populated continent in 2019, harming and displacing millions of people and costing billions, Christian Aid has said.
A report from the charity identifies 15 of the most destructive droughts, floods, fires, typhoons and cyclones of the past year.
All of the disasters identified in the Counting the Cost report are linked to human-caused climate change.
In some cases, studies have shown that climate change made them more likely or stronger, such as Cyclone Idai in Africa and floods in India and the US. In others, the event was the result of shifts in weather patterns, such as higher temperatures and reduced rainfall making wildfires more likely, or warmer water temperatures that “supercharged” tropical storms.
Of the 15 events identified, seven cost more than £7.6billion each, the charity said, and warned that the figures were likely to be an underestimate as in some cases they only include insured losses.
The most financially costly disasters were wildfires in California, which caused £19billion in damage, followed by Typhoon Hagibis in Japan, which cost £11billion. Floods in the American Midwest in March cost £9.5billion and China was hit by flooding between June and August that cost £9billion.
The events with the greatest loss of life were floods in northern India which killed 1900 and Cyclone Idai, which killed 1300, Christian Aid said.
The UK did not escape the weather extremes, with Storm Eberhard hitting the country along with Belgium and the Netherlands in early March, before moving east to affect Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine.
The storm caused damage across Europe costing between £760million and £1.3billion.
Analysis suggests severe wind storms are more likely to hit Europe as temperatures rise and in the UK, insurance claims from these kind of storms could increase by 50 per cent in some parts of the country.
Next November, the UK is set to host key UN climate talks in Glasgow.
Countries will be under pressure to increase cuts in greenhouse gases, to meet promises under the Paris Agreement on climate change and to curb temperature rises to 1.5C or 2C to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
Kat Kramer, Christian Aid report co-author, said: “2020 is going to be a huge year for how the world responds to the growing climate crisis. We have the biggest summit since the Paris Agreement was signed five years ago taking place in Glasgow, where countries must commit to further cut their emissions in line with the 1.5C temperature limit and boost funding for poor countries suffering from the kind of impacts seen in this report.”
Professor Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University, said: “With each day now we are seemingly reminded of the cost of climate inaction in the form of everthreatening climate changespiked weather extremes.”