Ten of the most destructive weather events this year caused a total of $170 billion in damage, according to an investigation by the British aid organization Christian Aid.
Most estimates are based only on insured losses, meaning that the real financial cost will probably be substantially greater.
Hurricane Ida, which struck the U.S. in August, topped the $65 billion in damage list.
Insurer Aon is warning that it is heading towards exceeding the 100 billion dollar limit of insured losses caused by global natural disasters by 2021 for a sixth time.
This is the sixth global natural disaster this year, which is expected to have cost upwards of $100 billion and have every occurred since 2011.
“The costs of climate change have been grave this year, both in terms of eyewatering financial losses but also in the death and displacement of people around the world. Be it storms and floods in some of the world’s richest countries or droughts and heatwaves in some of the poorest, the climate crisis hit hard in 2021,” said Kat Kramer, the report’s author and Christian Aid’s CAC director.
Serious floods, which plagued western and central Europe in the summer of 2021, caused serious losses of $43 billion and more than 240 deaths.
More than 300 people were killed and more than 17 billion dollars flooded through China’s Henan province in July.
