Evidence for sharp increase in the economic damages of extreme natural disasters

Abstract

SignificanceObservations indicate that climate change has driven an increase in the intensity of natural disasters. This, in turn, may drive an increase in economic damages. Whether these trends are real is an open and highly policy-relevant question. Based on decades of data, we provide robust evidence of mounting economic impacts, mostly driven by changes in the right tail of the damage distribution—that is, by major disasters. This points to a growing need for climate risk management.

The 2019 Mississippi and Missouri River Flooding and Its Impact on Atmospheric Boundary Layer Dynamics

“…Due to both rapidly changing climate and threats for more frequent floods (e.g., Woldemeskel & Sharma, 2016), several researchers emphasized the requirement for a conceptual framework to connect extreme precipitation features over extended regions and consequent flooding for studying the impact of perturbed LAFP on BLD variability (e.g., Coronese et al, 2019; Wright et al, 2019). In fact, the spring‐2019 flooding over the Great Plains could serve as a good case study and holds potential for future investigations of how LAFP are parameterized in weather and climate models (Maxwell et al, 2007).…”

“…In the rapidly changing climate regime of the 21st century, weather and climate phenomena are becoming less distinct, making the atmospheric processes a “continuum,” rather than a process of two separate time scales (e.g., Davy & Esau, 2016; Zhou et al, 2019). Thus, one requires an improved understanding of the connections between weather and climate, for example, when severe weather and natural disasters like flooding, droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes are becoming more frequent and causing economic damages (Coronese et al, 2019). For instance, over the United States, overall costs due to 254 weather and climate disasters from 1980–2019 exceeded $1.7 trillion (Smith & Matthews, 2015).…”

Reply to Geiger and Stomper: On capital intensity and observed increases in the economic damages of extreme natural disasters

“…We thank Geiger and Stomper (1) for the opportunity to clarify and further test the robustness of the results in Coronese et al (2). Their comments reveal misinterpretations of our study and propose an alternative (but untested) hypothesis.…”

The Green New Deal: Historical Foundations, Economic Fundamentals and Implementation Strategies

“…There is a relation between CO 2 concentration, temperature and disasters (Coronese, Lamperti, Keller, Chiaromonte & Roventini 2019). With global warming, the frequency and severity of disasters increases (Coronese et al 2019) but the impact of climate change is distributed highly unequally around the world (Puaschunder 2020) and also varies for specific disaster types, such as droughts, floods and storms etc. (Mittnik et al 2019).…”