New abnormal: Climate disaster damage 'down' to $268 billion
This past year has seen a horrific flood that submerged one-third of
Yet this wasn’t climate change at its worst.
With all that death and destruction in 2022, climate-related disaster damages are down from 2021, according to insurance and catastrophe giant
The number of
Weather disasters, many but not all of them turbocharged by human-caused climate change, are happening so frequently that this year’s onslaught, which 20 years ago would have smashed records by far, now in some financial measures seems a bit of a break from recent years.
Welcome to the new abnormal.
“We’ve almost gotten used to extremes. And this year compared to many years in the past would be considered a pretty intense year, but compared to maybe the most extreme years, like a 2017, 2020 and 2021, it does look like ... a slight adjustment down,” said
Wildfires in
When it comes to 2022’s financial damages globally and
Smith said
In the 1980s,
Globally “if you zoom in the last six years, 2017 to 2022, this has been particularly bad” especially compared to the five years before, said Martin Bertogg, Swiss Re’s head of catastrophic peril.
“It felt like a regime change, some people called it a new normal,” Bertogg said. But he thinks it was more getting back, after a brief respite, to a long-term trend of disaster costs steadily rising 5% to 7% a year.
“You’re spending money now because we’re not doing the things we ought to be doing,” Kerry said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We’ll be spending a hell of a lot more under much more stringent circumstances then than we are today if we don’t move faster.”
Not every year has to be a whopper. The
“A growing body of evidence indicates that climate change is increasing the variability as well as the average” of weather disasters, said
“The important thing is that the trend in disasters is increasing,” Field said. “And it will continue to increase until we halt the warming.”
Looking at damages, mostly insured losses, can give a skewed picture because how much a disaster cost depends greatly on how wealthy the area that the disaster hit, less so than the scale of the disaster itself, said
And even more important, these figures are about dollars, not people, and that distorts the true picture, said Guha-Sapir and
“What is insured is a small fraction of total infrastructure and the people killed in Pakistan,” which lowers the damage amount despite 1,700 people killed, Ebi said.
The flood in
“Pakistan just couldn’t catch a break this year. A January snowstorm killed 23 followed by a lethal spring heatwave, then devastating floods from June-October took over 1,700 lives and untold livelihoods,” said
“Additional heat in the atmosphere is sucking moisture out of soils, exacerbating drought and heatwaves," Francis said. "Evaporation from oceans and land also increases the amount of moisture in the air, which provides more fuel for storms and heavier downpours.”
Swiss Re’s Bertogg said although climate change is at work he estimates two-thirds, perhaps more, of the rise in damages is due to more people and things in harm’s way.
Urbanization across the globe puts more people in dense environments, which increases damage when disaster hits, Bertogg said. Then add urban sprawl that takes those cities and makes them geographically bigger and thus more vulnerable, he said. A good example of that is how wildfires started damaging more homes in
Plus more construction is being built on the coast and along waterways making them more vulnerable to storms and flooding, with flooding as “the biggest threat for the global economy,” Bertogg said.
But NOAA’s Smith keeps searching for a little silver lining in storm clouds: “I just hope the trends get a little bit less profound and less stressful for society. We all need a break.”
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