In the ten most expensive weather disasters in the world in 2020, the insured damage was worth $ 150 billion, surpassing the figure for 2019 and reflecting a long-term effect 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 Australia’s out-of-control wildfires to a record number of Atlantic hurricanes to November, the real cost of this year’s climate-enhanced disaster was in fact much higher because most losses were uninsured.
It is not surprising that the burden has fallen excessively on poor countries, according to the annual edition of the charity Christian Aid, entitled Count the cost of 2020: a year of climate change.
Only 4% of economic losses due to extreme events in climate-affected low-income countries were insured, compared to 60% in high-income economies, the report said, citing a study last month in The Lancet.
“Whether it’s floods in Asia, locusts in Africa or storms in Europe and the Americas, climate change has continued to rage in 2020,” said Kat Kramer, head of climate policy at Christian Aid.
Extreme weather conditions, of course, plagued mankind long before man-made global warming began to spill over into the planet’s climate system.
But more than a century of temperature and precipitation data, coupled with decades of satellite data on hurricanes and sea levels, have left no doubt that the earth’s global warming is amplifying its impact.
Massive tropical storms – also known as hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones – for example, are more likely to be stronger, last longer, carry more water and wander beyond their historical range.
The biggest record of 2020 mentioned Atlantic hurricanes in 2020 – with at least 400 deaths and $ 41 billion in damages – indicates that the world can also see more such storms.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) had to use Greek symbols after the letters in the Latin alphabet ran out.
Intense summer floods in China and India, where the monsoon season yielded abnormal rainfall for the second consecutive year, are also in line with projections on how the climate will affect precipitation.
Five of the most expensive extreme weather conditions in 2020 were related to Asia’s extraordinary rainfall.
“The 2020 flood was one of the worst in the history of Bangladesh, with more than a quarter of the country being submerged,” said Shahjahan Mondal, director of the Institute of Flood and Water Management at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. , said.
Wildfires that have scorched record areas in California, Australia and even the Russian Siberian interior, many of them within the Arctic Circle, also correspond to a warmer world and are predicted to get worse as temperatures rise.
The average surface temperature of the planet averaged at least 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to the late 19th century, and much of the warming took place in the last half century.
The 2015 Paris Agreement recommends the countries of the world collectively limit global warming to ‘well below’ 2C, and even if possible, even 1.5C.
An important report in 2018 from the UN’s IPCC Advisory Panel on Climate Science showed that 1.5C is a safer threshold, but the probability of staying below it is vanishingly small, according to many experts.
“Ultimately, the effects of climate change will be felt by the extremes, not average changes,” said Sarah Perkins-Kilpatrick, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales’ Climate Change Research Center.
If the increasing frequency and intensity of natural weather disasters match the modeling projections, the new field of attribution science can now give a number about the probability that such an event is likely due to global warming.
The unprecedented wildfires that destroyed 20% of Australia’s forests and killed tens of thousands of millions of wildlife, for example, have been made at least 30% more likely, according to research led by Friederike Otto at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute.