Strong storms, heat, drought are more common

Last year, floods, storms, wildfires and other disasters caused $270 billion in economic damage worldwide.

The market leader announced this on Tuesday. Although that was less than in 2021 with a loss of $ 320 billion, it was part of the “loss-intensive” past five years. The most financially serious catastrophe of the past year was Hurricane “Ian”, which hit the US East Coast at the end of September with damage of $ 100 billion.

Natural disasters are also becoming increasingly expensive for insurance companies: some 120 billion of the total damage of 270 billion dollars was insured. “We have something like a new normal with 100 billion annual claims for the insurance industry,” said Ernst Rauch, head of geo-research at Munich Re. “We have crossed that limit five times recently. In the future, we will increasingly reach or exceed one hundred billion.”

Munich Re has been documenting natural disasters for decades because the data is important for calculating insurance premiums. North America is often the hardest hit, including last year with total damage of USD 150 billion.

Hurricanes are a key factor in this. “Hurricane statistics in the Atlantic go back to 1851,” Rauch said. “Since then, there have been an average of 11 to 12 named tropical cyclones per year, but observational data from previous decades is not necessarily complete.”

Reliable data has been available since satellite observation began in the late 1970s. “And since then, we’ve had an average of about 14 to 15 storms a year, many of them hurricane-force. Our observation in recent years is that the number of storms in the North Atlantic has increased.”

Munich Re expects the trend, which is worrying for the east coast of the US and the Caribbean, to continue: “The share of particularly strong storms has also increased, and this will continue to increase due to climate change,” said Rauch.

The Asia/Pacific region comes second in losses from natural disasters at about $70 billion. The damage in Europe amounted to about 25 billion. According to the company’s geoscientists, extreme droughts and temperatures were particularly unusual.

“In Hamburg and London we had over 40 degrees for the first time and again – similar to 2018 – we saw a severe drought,” said Rauch. There aren’t many years in which climate change can be felt so directly in Germany.” Rauch’s expectation for the future: “We will see this combination of heat and drought more often in the future.”

According to evaluations by the EU Earth observation program Copernicus, the summer of 2022 was the warmest ever recorded in Europe, and the whole of 2022 was the second warmest since records began in 1979. Only 2020 has been hotter so far.

In addition, individual natural disasters are now causing much greater damage in some regions of the world than in the past: “The floods in Australia show a sudden development of claims, which we are seeing more and more in some countries and with some natural hazards,” Rauch said.

For example, flood damage in Australia totaled $4.7 billion, significantly more than double the largest flood damage to date of $1.8 billion.

This also applies to Germany: “In the Ahr valley, the insured damage of eight billion euros exceeded the previous flood damage record in Germany by a factor of four,” Rauch cited the flood of the summer of 2021 as an example.

According to analyzes by the EU’s Copernicus programme, temperatures in Europe have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past 30 years. Europe is warming the most of all seven continents. The concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere will reach record highs in 2022: an annual average of 417 ppm (parts per million) for carbon dioxide and 1894 ppb (parts per billion) for methane.

The measurements showed “atmospheric concentrations continue to rise without showing signs of slowing down,” says Vincent-Henri Peuch, head of the Copernicus Monitoring Service. The observations are based on measurements on the ground, in the air and in the water, but also from Earth observation and weather satellites.

(SDA)