Climate change-driven disasters have caused damages equivalent to $391 million a day for 20 years, according to projections published in the journal Nature Communications.
Researchers determined that between 2000 and 2019, climate disasters such as droughts and heatwaves did about $143 billion of damage annually. They attributed 63 percent of those damages — $90 billion — to loss of human lives, and the remainder predominantly to property damage.
Researchers noted that the projections also fail to capture indirect impacts that “may be significant.” As an example, they cited the impacts of air pollution in the northeastern U.S. from Canada’s 2023 wildfires, although those occurred outside the research’s date range. Their methodology cannot “account for these indirect losses, even though these could conceivably be orders of magnitude larger than the original damage wrought by these events (and were likely much larger in this specific case),” researchers wrote.
On a year-by-year basis, the highest costs from climate change were in 2008, when researchers put costs at $620 billion. Other high points occurred in 2003 and 2010. These peaks, the researchers noted, were driven by particularly high-casualty climate events in those years. For example, 2008 saw Tropical Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, which killed an estimated 84,537 people, while in 2003, a European heatwave caused an estimated 70,000 deaths.
Excluding loss of life from the equation changes the years when damages peaked. Under this formula, the peaks were in 2005, when Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma did $123 billion in financial damages, and 2017, when Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria did $139 billion in damages. Notably, all of these storms hit the United States, suggesting that while the U.S. has suffered some of the most expensive climate disasters, the deadliest occurred elsewhere.
The date range for the research ends before 2023, which saw the hottest summer ever recorded. Recent years have also seen further heatwaves in Europe, as well as similar extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest, which, like Europe, is not acclimated to such temperatures, meaning numerous residents do not have air conditioning.