The Costs of Extreme Weather Events Caused by Climate Change

CMCC@Ca’Foscari online seminar
Thursday, May 26th, 2022 | h. 02:00 pm CEST
Please pre-register at this link: https://bit.ly/3kXf5m3
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Speaker:

Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change and Professor of Economics at Victoria University of Wellington

Moderator:

Letizia Monteleone, Research fellow at CMCC@Ca’Foscari, Risk Assessment and Adaptation Strategies Division

Abstract:

Climate change is already increasing the severity of some extreme weather events, such as with rainfall during tropical or extra-tropical cyclones. Extreme Weather Event Attribution, a branch of climate science, quantifies the extent to which anthropogenic climate change has modified the frequencies and intensities of specific extreme weather events that have already occurred. But, no previous research has combined this information with socio-economic data to identify the share of the economic costs of extreme weather events that was caused by climate change. We present two examples of such an approach. In the first, we use attribution science about Hurricane Harvey (in Texas, 2017) with hydrological flood models and detailed land-parcel and census tract socio-economic data. We describe the micro-scale spatial characteristics of current climate change-induced impacts. In the second example, using a meta-analysis of attribution quantifications, we demonstrate that the global current costs of climate change are underestimated. We estimate that climate change-attributed extreme weather events have cost the world $2.9 trillion from 2000 to 2019. This is significantly higher than estimates from leading Integrated Assessment Models (IAM) such as DICE and FUND.

Sperakers’ short bio:

Professor Ilan Noy is the Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington, a role he has held since 2013. His research and teaching focus on the economic aspects of natural hazards, disasters, and climate change, and other related topics in environmental, development, and international economics. He is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Economics of Disasters and Climate Change. He previously worked at the University of Hawai’i, and has consulted for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, UNDRR, the International Monetary Fund, and ASEAN.

Letizia Monteleone, research fellow at CMCC in the Risk Assessment and Adaptation Strategy division, is an economist with an international development background. Before joining CMCC, Letizia worked three years for an international development consultancy, managing and designing projects funded by donors such as the UK Department of International Development and Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the World Bank and the French Development Agency (AFD) in the areas of climate, environment and economic growth. More recently, Letizia was a junior researcher on the Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for the Coastal Zones of the Dominican Republic, project under the AFD Adapt’Action framework. Letizia holds a MSc in Economics for Development and Growth from Carlos III University and a BSc in Economics, Politics and International Relations from Royal Holloway University in UK. She speaks English, Spanish and Italian fluently.

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CMCC@Ca’Foscari