Extreme Weather Cost Billions in Damage in 2021, Study Finds

A new study from the Christian Aid char­ity has found that 10 major nat­ural cat­a­stro­phes that hit the planet in 2021 each had a finan­cial impact of tens of bil­lions of Euros.

The study cal­cu­lated the dam­age caused by extreme weather events, mostly in devel­oped coun­tries, where data from insur­ance claims are read­ily avail­able to allow for the eco­nomic impact to be cal­cu­lated. Each of the events ana­lyzed had esti­mated dam­ages exceed­ing €1.32 bil­lion.

Hurricane Ida, which claimed 95 human lives and swept most of the east­ern United States, impact­ing cities from New Orleans to New York last August, is iden­ti­fied in the study as the most finan­cially dev­as­tat­ing event of 2021, with a total cost of around €57 bil­lion.

July’s flood­ing in sev­eral cen­tral European coun­tries was the sec­ond-largest costly weather event and took a heavy toll on human lives with 240 deaths. According to the report, the eco­nomic cost of the flood­ing totaled €38 bil­lion.

The cold wave that hit France last April and impacted olive trees, vine­yards and other crops is also included in the list of the costli­est dis­as­ters of 2021, hav­ing incurred finan­cial dam­age of €4.94 bil­lion to French farm­ers.

Although extreme weather events were not directly cor­re­lated with cli­mate change in the report, the increas­ingly warm weather of the planet could increase the like­li­hood of severe events, the authors of the report said.

“A study by World Weather Attribution con­cluded that cli­mate change made extreme rain­fall events sim­i­lar to those that led to the floods in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg between 1.2 and nine-times more likely to hap­pen, and that such down­pours in the region are now three to 19-per­cent heav­ier because of human-caused warm­ing,” the authors wrote.

The study also doc­u­mented other extreme weather events of 2021 with a vague eco­nomic impact but a pro­found con­se­quence on peo­ple and ecosys­tems. These included flood­ing in South Sudan, which forced more than 800,000 peo­ple to relo­cate, and the trop­i­cal cyclone Tauktae, which affected more than 200,000 peo­ple in India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

“That’s a huge human impact,” said Kat Kramer, the lead­ing report author. ​“Obviously, los­ing your home, your liveli­hoods and every­thing, and not hav­ing the resources to rebuild, that is incred­i­bly tough. Whereas at least if you have insur­ance, you have some mech­a­nism for build­ing that back.”

The report called on wealthy coun­tries to dras­ti­cally reduce car­bon diox­ide emis­sions to pre­vent future extreme weather events from becom­ing a real­ity.

Furthermore, the char­ity has sum­moned world lead­ers to cre­ate the means to sup­port peo­ple hit by cli­mate-related events in devel­op­ing coun­tries finan­cially.

“Although it was good to see the issue of loss and dam­age become a major issue at COP26, it was bit­terly dis­ap­point­ing to leave with­out a fund set up to actu­ally help peo­ple who are suf­fer­ing per­ma­nent losses from cli­mate change,” said Nushrat Chowdhury, Christian Aid’s cli­mate jus­tice adviser in Bangladesh.

“Bringing that fund to life needs to be a global pri­or­ity in 2022,” he con­cluded.

• BBC News