The 10 most expensive climate disasters in the world in 2020 saw insured damage worth $ 150 billion, exceeding the numbers for 2019 and reflecting a long-term impact of global warming, according to a new report.
The same disasters claimed at least 3,500 lives and displaced more than 13.5 million people.
From uncontrolled forest fires in Australia to a record number of hurricanes in the Atlantic through November, the true cost of calamities exacerbated by the year’s climate was in fact much greater because most of the losses were not insured.
Not surprisingly, the burden fell disproportionately on poor nations, according to the Christian Aid charity’s annual count, Count the cost of 2020: a year of climate collapse.
Only 4% of economic losses from extreme climate-affected events in low-income countries were insured, compared with 60% in high-income economies, the report said, citing a study last month in The Lancet.
“Whether it’s flooding in Asia, locusts in Africa or storms in Europe and the Americas, climate change continued to increase in 2020,” said Christian Aid climate policy leader Kat Kramer.
Extreme climatic disasters, of course, have plagued mankind long before man-made global warming begins to mess with the planet’s climate system.
But more than a century of temperature and precipitation data, coupled with decades of satellite data on hurricanes and rising sea levels, left no doubt that warming the Earth’s surface is magnifying its impact.
Massive tropical storms – also known as hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones – are now more likely, for example, to be stronger, last longer, carry more water and wander beyond their historical reach.
The record number of hurricanes in the Atlantic in 2020 – with at least 400 deaths and $ 41 billion in damage – suggests that the world could also see more such storms.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) had to use Greek symbols after running out of letters in the Latin alphabet.
The intense summer floods in China and India, where the monsoon season has brought abnormal rains for the second consecutive year, are also consistent with projections about how the climate will affect precipitation.
Five of the most expensive extreme weather events in 2020 were related to Asia’s exceptionally rainy monsoons.
“The 2020 flood was one of the worst in Bangladesh’s history, more than a quarter of the country was submerged,” said Shahjahan Mondal, director of the flood and water management institute at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
Forest fires that have burned record areas in California, Australia and even the Siberian interior of Russia, much of it within the Arctic circle, are also consistent with a warmer world that is predicted to get worse as temperatures rise.
The average temperature of the planet’s surface rose at least 1.1 degrees Celsius on average compared to the end of the 19th century, with much of that warming occurring in the last half of the century.
The 2015 Paris agreement mandates that the nations of the world collectively limit global warming to “well below” 2C, and up to 1.5C, if possible.
A striking report in 2018 by the UN IPCC climate science advisory panel showed that 1.5 ° C is a safer limit, but the likelihood of staying below it has become less and less, according to many experts.
“Ultimately, the impacts of climate change will be felt through extremes, not medium changes,” noted Sarah Perkins-Kilpatrick, senior professor at the Center for Climate Change Research at the University of New South Wales.
If the increasing frequency and intensity of natural climate disasters are consistent with modeling projections, the new field of attribution science is now able to determine how much more likely that event is due to global warming.
The unprecedented forest fires that destroyed 20% of Australia’s forests and killed tens of millions of wildlife in late 2019 and early 2020, for example, have become at least 30% more likely, according to research led by Friederike Otto, from the University of Oxford. change institute.