Climate Change and Disaster Losses Workshop Report

October 17th, 2006

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

Last May, Peter Hoeppe of Munich Re and I organized a workshop to bring together a diverse group of international experts in the fields of climatology and disaster research. The general questions to be answered at the workshop were:

* What factors account for increasing costs of weather related disasters in recent decades?

* What are the implications of these understandings, for both research and policy?

We are happy to release our final workshop report. From the workshop home page you can download PDFs of:

*The entire report (8 mb)
*Executive Summary
*Summary Report
*Individual participant white papers from:

* C. Bals
* L. Bouwer
* R. Brázdil
* H. Brooks
* I. Burton
* R. Crompton et al.
* A. Dlugolecki
* P. Epstein
* E. Faust et al.
* I. Goklany
* H. Grenier
* B. R. Gurjar et al.
* J. Helminen
* S. Jun
* C. Kemfert and K. Schumacher
* T. Knutson
* R. Muir-Wood et al.
* R. Pielke, Jr.
* S. Raghavan
* G. Tetzlaff
* E. Tompkins
* H. von Storch and R. Weisse
* Q. Ye
* R. Zapata-Marti

The workshop’s major sponsors were Munich Re and the U.S. National Science Foundation, with contributing sponsorship from the GKSS Institute for Coastal Research and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

3 Responses to “Climate Change and Disaster Losses Workshop Report”

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  1. Lab Lemming Says:
    October 17th, 2006 at 5:50 pm

    Read the summary. I didn’t see any mention of drought among the various disasters discussed. Is this because the damages are negligible compared to wind/rain events, or for some other reason?

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  2. Roger Pielke, Jr. Says:
    October 17th, 2006 at 10:32 pm

    LL- Thanks. We focused on storms and floods because these are responsible for the vast majority of losses world wide. That being said, drought does have large impacts which are almost without excpetion very poorly documented and quantified. We have discussed perhaps focusing on drought in a follow-up workshop. I note the following paper is relevant to this subject:

    http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL025711.shtml

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  3. Lab Lemming Says:
    October 17th, 2006 at 11:07 pm

    Well, down under, drought and climate change have been front page news all week, ever since the wheat forcast was updated to be the worst since either ‘02 or ‘82. The main fallout has been a flurry of finger-pointing, since currenty all the states are run by the labor party, which is in opposition Federally.

    Any news outlet should give plenty of stories, but here is a good starting point:
    See http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20578433-601,00.html
    and associated links for starters.

    From the economics POV, though, one of the hard things to quantify is the fact that crop failures increase prices, so the $ value of the crop is not linearly correlated with the size of the harvest…