The climate crisis has a price — and it’s $391 million a day

Damage from the global climate crisis has amounted to $391 million per day over the past two decades, a report showed.

Wildfires, heatwaves, droughts and other extreme events attributable to climate change have incurred costs averaging over a hundred billion per year from 2000 to 2019, a recent study published in the journal Nature Communications showed. 

“We find that US$143 billion per year of the costs of extreme events is attributable to climatic change. The majority (63%) of this is due to human loss of life,” scientists wrote in the report. The remainder stems from the destruction of property and other assets.

The years with the highest amount of losses were 2008, followed by 2003 and then 2010 — all of which were driven by high mortality events, the research said.

Tropical Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar in 2008, which took more than 80,000 lives, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. 2003 saw a severe heatwave across continental Europe which claimed 70,000 lives. In 2010, there was a heatwave in Russia and a drought in Somalia.

The estimates of the losses were calculated by combining the economic data of these losses, along with how much global heating has exacerbated weather events.

The research, however, notes that there is an underestimation of the true costs of climate change due to the difficulty of measuring indirect losses. Examples cited include productivity losses arising from a heatwave, mental health impacts borne by people, or the loss of access to education and jobs if a place of employment is damaged.