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ABSTRACT
Nowadays, following every weather disaster quickly follow estimates of economic loss. Quick blame for those losses, or some part, often is placed on claims of more frequent or intense weather events. However, understanding what role changes in climate may have played in increasing weather-related disaster losses is challenging because, in addition to changes in climate, society also undergoes dramatic change. Increasing development and wealth influence exposure and vulnerability to loss – typically increasing exposure while reducing vulnerability. In recent decades a scientific literature has emerged that seeks to adjust historical economic damage from extreme weather to remove the influences of societal change from economic loss time series to estimate what losses past extreme events would cause under present-day societal conditions. In regions with broad exposure to loss, an unbiased economic normalisation will exhibit trends consistent with corresponding climatological trends in related extreme events, providing an independent check on normalisation results. This paper reviews 54 normalisation studies published 1998–2020 and finds little evidence to support claims that any part of the overall increase in global economic losses documented on climate time scales is attributable to human-caused changes in climate, reinforcing conclusions of recent assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2 The IPCC convening lead authors for the Chapter 10 were queried on these studies under the IPCC protocol for reporting errors (https://wg1.ipcc.ch/procedures/ipcc-error-protocol.pdf). They responded promptly and confirmed that their inclusion of these studies was based on a less precise use of the concept of normalization than is employed here. In addition, Bouwer (Citation2019) included in its review Downton et al. (Citation2005) which does not perform a normalization analysis, and this paper was thus also not included in the current review.
4 Losses at the global scale are dominated by losses in wealthy regions, (cf. Mohleji & Pielke, Citation2014; Watts et al., Citation2019).
5 https://www.air-worldwide.com/Publications/AIR-Currents/2017/Top-10-Historical-Hurricanes-in-the-U-S---What-Would-They-Cost-Today-/ Such catastrophe models undergo rigorous independent review: See, in particular, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ study of catastrophe modeling: https://www.actuary.org/sites/default/files/files/publications/Catastrophe_Modeling_Monograph_07.25.2018.pdf and the Florida Commission on Hurricane Loss Projection Methodology: https://www.sbafla.com/method/ For an in-depth discussion, see Weinkle and Pielke (Citation2017).