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Topics: News, World News, Climate Change, Science, Money
Niamh Shackleton
Topics: News, World News, Climate Change, Science, Money
Climate change is affecting us in more ways than you think, with global warming estimated to cost billions a year.
The extreme weather that comes with climate change - including storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts - have both ripped apart people's lives, as well as taken many.
Global heating caused by human activity is one of the main causes of extreme weather, and it's become a prominent issue in the last 20 years in particular.
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According to new research published on Nature Communications, $143 billion per year of the socio-economic costs associated with of extreme events is attributable to climatic change, 63 percent of which is down to the loss of human life.
Researchers Rebecca Newman and Ilan Noy, both from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, collected data from available Extreme Event Attribution (EEA) studies - which look at the links between greenhouse emissions and specific weather events - and combined this with data on the costs of extreme weather event over the last two decades.
They then estimated missing data to come to a conclusion.
They found that there were average costs of $143 billion a year from 2000 to 2019 - but this worryingly almost doubled in the year 2022.
While 63 percent of money was spent on the lives lost as a result of the extreme weather event, a third was down to property damage and other assets being ravaged.
185 data sets were looked at, where a heartbreaking 60,951 deaths were attributable to climate change.
Noy and Newman's findings could prove vital in helping fund future responses to extreme weather events and could be used to calculate how much funding was needed for a loss and damage fund established at United Nations’ climate summit last year.
The fund aims to help poorer countries pay for the damage caused by things such as hurricanes and floods.
Their research could also help the speed of funds getting to the affected areas for individual disasters.
Noy said of their study: "The headline number is $140bn a year and, first of all, that’s already a big number.
"Second, when you compare it to the standard quantification of the cost of climate change [using computer models], it seems those quantifications are underestimating the impact of climate change.”
He argued there were many natural disasters that had no data about the number of people killed or the economic damage.
He also highlighted gaps in the available data, such as he and Newman only having the number of deaths from heatwaves in Europe with 'no idea how many people died from heatwaves in all of sub-Saharan Africa'.