Climate crisis costing $16M an hour in extreme weather damage

Analysis shows at least $2.8tn in damage from 2000 to 2019 through worsened storms, floods and heatwaves

[...]

Storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts have taken many lives and destroyed swathes of property in recent decades, with global heating making the events more frequent and intense. The study is the first to calculate a global figure for the increased costs directly attributable to human-caused global heating.

It found average costs of $140bn (£115bn) a year from 2000 to 2019, although the figure varies significantly from year to year. The latest data shows $280bn in costs in 2022. The researchers said lack of data, particularly in low-income countries, meant the figures were likely to be seriously underestimated.

[...]

The researchers produced the estimates by combining data on how much global heating worsened extreme weather events with economic data on losses. The study also found that the number of people affected by extreme weather because of the climate crisis was 1.2 billion over two decades.

Two-thirds of the damage costs were due to the lives lost, while a third was due to property and other assets being destroyed. Storms, such as Hurricane Harvey and Cyclone Nargis, were responsible for two-thirds of the climate costs, with 16% from heatwaves and 10% from floods and droughts.

[...]

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, took a different approach based on how climate change had exacerbated the extreme weather events. Hundreds of “attribution” studies have been done, calculating how much more frequent global heating made extreme weather events. This allows the fraction of the damages resulting from human-caused heating to be estimated.

[...]