Catastrophes in 2020 caused $210 trillion of destruction and demonstrated increased cost of climate change.
According to a report by the reinsurance company Munich Re, the world’s record number of hurricanes, fires, and floods triggered by climatic change cost $210 billion last year. The overall damage in the US was 95 billion dollars, almost twice the loss in 2019. The country had a record number of hurricanes and wildfires in California in 2020, the second warmest year. Climate change and economic losses often rise as more populations expand into disaster-prone regions, causing more frequent and severe disasters such as hurricanes or strike waves, and forest fires. In its survey, “natural disaster losses were substantially higher than the preceding year 2020,” Re-Executive Board Member Torsten Jeworrek said, “an increasing role will be played in all these threats by climate change.
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The Atlantic has ended a historic hurricane season. “I lost all” broke a glimpse at the archives. People fighting to reconstruct heat waves became fatal, nights colder than days—a nutshell of Louisiana. The six most costly disasters in the United States in 2020 were Hurricane Laura. After the storm destroyed parts of Louisiana in August, it caused $13 billion in damage. A record 30 storms during the Atlantic hurricane season were recorded as having cost 43 billion dollars, nearly half of the overall disaster loss in the United States last year, the study said.
A series of severe storms in the Midwest caused losses of 6.8 billion dollars in August and devastated millions of hectares of Iowa’s agricultural land. The Western drought also sparked hundreds of significant wildfires, which resulted in losses of $16 billion. The lack of insurance coverage for disasters in developed countries represents a significant problem in the study. Asia totaled $67 billion in catastrophe damages, of which just $3 billion was undercover.
The worst disaster in the past year was China’s summer monsoon flooding, which was 17 billion dollars in damage, only 2 percent covered. In May, Cyclone Amphan struck India and Bangladesh, causing losses of $14 billion, of which very little had been insured.
