Climate crisis costing $16m an hour in extreme weather damage, study estimates

THE GUARDIAN

The damage caused by the climate crisis through extreme weather has cost $16m (£13m) an hour for the past 20 years, according to a new estimate.

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. Additional climate costs, such as from crop yield declines and sea level rise, were also not included.

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 researchers said their methods could be used to calculate how much funding was needed for a loss and damage fund established at the UN’s climate summit in 2022, which is intended to pay for the recovery from extreme weather disasters in poorer countries. It could also rapidly determine the specific climate cost of individual disasters, enabling faster delivery of funds.

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