Costs of natural disasters in 2003 rise nearly 10 per cent – UN report

Natural disasters, the lion's share of them weather-related catastrophes, cost the world over $60 billion in 2003, up from around $55 billion the year before, and are part of a worrying trend that is being linked with climate change, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said today.

Releasing a report by experts with UNEP’s Finance Initiative, the agency called on governments, business and industry to back emerging emissions-trading markets as one way of tackling the crisis.

"Climate change is not a prognosis, it is a reality that is, and will increasingly, bring human suffering and economic hardship,” UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said following a meeting in Milan, Italy. “Developed countries have a responsibility to reduce their emissions, but also have a responsibility to help developing countries adapt to the impacts of global warming.”

Noting that the Kyoto Protocol, the instrument agreed on in 1997 to reduce emissions linked to global warming, remains unratified and not in force, Mr. Toepfer declared: “So here, in Milan, we need to engage with even greater vigour in this marathon race against climate change. We need political will, technological innovation and economic creativity.

“One key weapon is emissions trading. I would therefore urge the heads of all large corporations to join the various schemes being proposed so that market forces and market instruments, properly regulated by governments, can play their part,” he added.

Thomas Loster, head of Weather/Climate Risks Research at the Munich Re insurance company and head of the Climate Change Working Group of UNEP’s Finance Initiative, said: "We will have to get used to the fact that extreme summers, like the one we had in Europe this year, are to be expected more frequently in the future and that they will become more or less the norm by the middle of the century. The summer of 2003, with its extensive losses, is therefore a glimpse into the future, a 'future summer' so to speak."

The European heat wave, in which crops and livestock wilted in many countries and some 20,000 people were killed, is expected to have been the most costly single event of 2003 with agricultural losses alone estimated to be over $10 billion. The second most costly events are likely to have been the floods along the Huai and Yangtze Rivers in China between July and September when 650,000 apartments were damaged with overall losses estimated at nearly $8 billion, according to the preliminary "snapshot" findings from Munich Re.