Climate Change and Disaster Losses: Understanding and Attributing Losses and

• Main Author: Hervé Grenier
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.191.479; http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/sparc/research/projects/extreme_events/munich_workshop/grenier.pdf

Question 1: What factors account for the dramatically increasing costs of weather-related disasters (specifically, floods and storms) in recent decades? 2 L osses (adjusted for inflation) caused by natural catastrophes, as defined by the US property insurance industry, have risen by a factor close to 100 between the 1950s and the past decade (Changnon et al. 2000). For a storm to create significant economic losses, two conditions have to be met: storm occurrence at a sufficiently high intensity, and exposition of vulnerable assets to this hazard. Losses increases have to be driven by one of these two factors, or recent appearance of new loss drivers. Could part of these losses increases be driven by greenhouse induced global warming? Over the tropical North-Atlantic, the tropical cyclone record extends back to 1900. The North-Atlantic is the basin where data is the most complete, but it is only since 1970 that the data set is considered appropriate for detection of trends. Prior to that date, storms may have been missed. Post-1970 hurricane wind speed records indicate a clear increase in hurricane activity over the past decades (Emanuel 2005, Webster et al. 2005) which is well correlated with North-Atlantic Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) trend. At least part of this trend is attributed to anthropogenic activities (Pierce et al, 2006). However, even for this modern era record, there is some controversy in hurricane wind speed estimates (Landsea