Parts of Sanibel Causeway and its bridge are washed away after Hurricane Ian passed through in Sanibel, Florida on Sept. 29, 2022. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
According to a new report by the International Chamber of Commerce and consultancy firm Oxera, extreme weather events over the past 10 years have cost a total of $2 trillion globally. The countries that have faced the biggest losses include the U.S., China and India.
The report tracked nearly 4,000 extreme weather events from 2014 through 2023. In total, the results found that these events affected more than 1.6 billion people and cost around $2 trillion in economic losses.
Over just the past two years, losses linked to extreme weather cost the world $451 billion. According to the report, that is about 19% more than the losses from the previous 8 years analyzed in the study.
“The data from the past decade shows definitively that climate change is not a future problem: major productivity losses from extreme weather events are being felt in the here and now by the real economy,” John W.H. Denton AO, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement.
The report also warned about the increase in frequency of these extreme weather events, noting that there has been an 83% increase in climate disasters when comparing 1980–1999 to 2000–2019.
A view of the damaged area after a deluge brought up to 200 liters of rain per square meter (50 gallons per square yard) in hours in towns across the region of Valencia, Spain on October 30, 2024. (Photo: Alex Juarez/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“These disasters are only getting worse, and stopping the industries and systems driving climate collapse is the only rational response,” one climate group said.
Spain’s deadliest flooding in 30 years killed at least 72 people as torrential rain slammed the eastern region of Valencia on Tuesday, with some towns recording a year’s worth of rain in a single day.
The flooding sent churning muddy water down narrow streets, tossing cars, downing trees, bulldozing bridges and buildings, and trapping people in rising flood waters.
“The neighborhood is destroyed, all the cars are on top of each other, it’s literally smashed up,” Christian Viena, who owns a bar in Valencia’s Barrio de la Torre, told The Associated Press. “Everything is a total wreck, everything is ready to be thrown away. The mud is almost 30 centimeters (11 inches) deep.”
As of Wednesday morning, officials reported 70 deaths in Valencia and two in the bordering region of Castilla La Mancha. However, the death toll could rise as search and rescue operations continue amid difficult conditions, such as power outages and blocked roadways. Many people remain missing with their fates uncertain.
This includes residents of Utiel in Valencia, whose mayor, Ricardo Gabaldón, told Spanish broadcaster RTVE that Tuesday was the “worst day of my life.”
“We were trapped like rats,” Gabaldón said. “Cars and trash containers were flowing down the streets. The water was rising to 3 meters (9.8 feet).”
One person who was rescued was Denis Hlavaty, who spent the night perched on the edge of the roof of a gas station where he works.
“It’s a river that came through,” Hlavaty told Reuters, adding, “The doors were torn away and I spent the night there, surrounded by water that was 2 metres (6.5-feet) deep.”
“The fossil fuel industry increases the climate emergency, destroys the balance of critical ecosystems, and puts people’s lives in danger.”
The storm also canceled high-speed rail travel between Valencia and Madrid and Barcelona, and derailed one high-speed train near Malaga, though no one was injured.
While the rains had tapered off in Valencia by Wednesday morning, the rest of the country is not out of danger, as the storm is projected to move northeast.
“We mustn’t let our guard down because the weather front is still wreaking havoc and we can’t say that this devastating episode is over,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the nation on television Wednesday.
Even if the death toll does not rise, Tuesday’s floods are already the deadliest in Spain since 1996, when a flood near the Pyrenees killed 87. They are also the deadliest in Europe since floods in 2021 that killed at least 185.
In the immediate term, Tuesday’s deluge was caused by a phenomenon called a gota fría, or “cold drop,” a storm formed as cold air moves over the warm Mediterranean. In Spain, these kinds of storms are also commonly referred to with the acronym DANA—for Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos, or isolated high-level depression.
However, scientists observe that the climate crisis is making rainstorms like this one more extreme, as warmer air can hold more moisture to dump when conditions are right. For Europe specifically, the warming of the Mediterranean causes more water to evaporate from its surface, super-charging rainstorms.
“Events of this type, which used to occur many decades apart, are now becoming more frequent and their destructive capacity is greater,” Ernesto Rodriguez Camino, senior state meteorologist and a member of the Spanish Meteorological Association, told Reuters.
The Spanish flooding comes a little more than a month after record rainfall swamped Central Europe and Eastern Europe, in an event that scientists concluded was made approximately twice as likely and 7% more severe by the climate crisis fueled primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
“When we talk about climate change and climate emergency, it’s often perceived as an abstract concept far from our daily reality,” Eva Saldaña, the executive director of Greenpeace Spain, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this is climate change: the intensification of extreme weather phenomenons like what happened tonight, with the level of destruction greater each time. Ignoring it causes deaths that we cannot allow.”
In a post on social media, Greenpeace Spain said that fossil fuel companies including the Spanish Repsol should pay for the damages.
“DANAS are more intense every time due to climate change,” the group wrote. “The fossil fuel industry increases the climate emergency, destroys the balance of critical ecosystems, and puts people’s lives in danger.”
⛈️Las DANAS son cada vez más intensas por el cambio climático. La industria fósil aumenta la emergencia climática, destruye el equilibrio de ecosistemas críticos del planeta y pone en peligro la vida de las personas.
Extinction Rebellion Global agreed. “These disasters are only getting worse, and stopping the industries and systems driving climate collapse is the only rational response,” the group wrote on social media.
The U.S.-based Climate Defiance, meanwhile, shared images of flood-ravaged streets with dismissals often leveled at climate activists.
Yellow Dot Studios, Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay’s climate-focused media studio, also shared an image of cars dropped in piles in the street by the flood waters to call out the double-standard in how direct-action climate protests and the corporate crimes of the fossil fuel industry are punished.
Friends of the Earth Spain focused on the human impacts, arguing that urgent climate action meant “putting people’s lives, and not economic models, at the center.”
“Don’t prioritize sending people to work in extreme and dangerous conditions,” the group wrote. “It is a priority to take effective, ambitious, and urgent measures in response to the climate crisis we are living through.”
Workers in Cuba have worked to gradually restore the power grid. Photo: Minister of Energy and Mines
After several false starts over the weekend, the efforts to recover Cuba’s electrical system began to make headway on October 21. Meanwhile, authorities have declared that Oscar has become a tropical storm.
In this regard, President Miguel Dïaz-Canel said “We were at the National Load Dispatch since very early in the morning. The microsystems in the country are being strengthened and Havana is gradually receiving energy. It is a complex job, but we are taking sure steps. We said that we will not rest until the total reestablishment.”
In other parts of the country, reconnections continue while attempts are made to repair the damages suffered by the thermoelectric power plants, which, due to the difficulties of access to spare parts and technological elements that help to repower the system (caused fundamentally by the criminal economic blockade suffered by Cuba on the part of the US government), the repair tasks are very complicated.
Tropical Storm Oscar
Amid the critical situation with the collapse of the power grid, Hurricane Oscar made landfall on the Caribbean Island late on Sunday. Fortunately for the inhabitants of eastern Cuba, the storm downgraded its intensity and hit the island as a tropical storm, though still unleashing heavy rains and wind in the eastern region. The level of damage that Oscar can produce is still uncertain.
La tormenta tropical Oscar transita lentamente por el Oriente de #Cuba. Se trabajan intensamente para proteger al pueblo y minimizar las afectaciones. Son múltiples las muestras de solidaridad entre nuestra gente. Como se explicó existe un grupo de recursos para la recuperación. pic.twitter.com/26LzX5Qhqw
According to experts, the storm is now headed to the Bahamas, though authorities have called on the population to not lower their guard and to be alert to official communication channels.
The world stands with Cuba
Amid Cuba’s blackout, the member states of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP), expressed in a communiqué their support to the Cuban government and offered their help to overcome the difficult times the island is going through: “The complex situation that [Cuba] is experiencing today is a consequence of the economic war, financial persecution and [the refusal to sell] fuel supplies by the US administration, which seeks to asphyxiate Cuba in its commitment to the well-being of the Cuban people”.
Furthermore, the communiqué adds “The policy of maximum pressure through unilateral coercive measures and the blockade against the nation is cruel and inhuman and has been categorically rejected by the majority of the countries of the world, since […] it only seeks a change of regime, in open violation of the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter and the norms of International Law.”
In a press conference on October 21, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, Lin Jian, also expressed support to Cuba as it faces unprecedented challenges, “[The] US blockade on Cuba has been catastrophic for Cuba’s socioeconomic development and people’s lives. China once again calls on the US to fully lift the blockade and sanctions on Cuba at once and remove Cuba from the list of ‘state sponsors of terrorism.’”
In a statement, the platform of social movements of Latin America and the Caribbean, ALBA Movimientos, categorized the current situation on the island as one of “anguish and tension, a product of the suffering induced by the criminal blockade.” ALBA Movimientos argues that the US-imposed blockade ultimately seeks to “undermine the role of the Cuban State in satisfying the basic needs of the population, while trying to privilege an incipient private sector, incapable by its condition of providing the levels and extent of social justice achieved by the Revolution.”
In the statement, the movements also warn that this latest episode of blockade-induced hardship on the island could be seized upon by reactionary, counter-revolutionary forces. “At this moment, all the psychological pressure apparatus is being used to induce a social outburst of unforeseeable consequences, using as a basis and pretext the legitimate expressions of social unrest resulting from the current situation, its accumulated and possible solutions,” it warns.
The only viable solution which would respect the sovereignty of Cuba and guarantee the possibility of dignified life, is the immediate and irreversible lifting of the blockade on Cuba, concludes ALBA.
Meanwhile, the White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre claimed in a press conference on October 21, that the US is “not to blame for the blackouts on the island or the overall energy situation in Cuba.”
Wheat before harvest in Hampshire, England on Aug. 3, 2013. Neil Howard / Flickr
In England, wet weather brought on by climate change has led to the second-worst harvest on record, affecting everything from wine grapes to wheat.
As The Guardian reported, a longer stretch of cold, wet weather from fall to early summer has led to wine grape harvests that are down by 33% to 75%, depending on the region. According to World Weather Attribution, rain in the UK from late 2023 into early 2024 was 20% more intense because of climate change.
For 2024, the UK Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) found that the wheat harvest in England was around 10 million metric tons, which was down 22% compared to the 2023 harvest. The decline reflects both a decrease in the wheat yield and the area that was used for wheat farming.
Other major crops also saw declines, with a decrease of 26% in barley harvested in the winter (although the spring harvest of barley saw a 41% increase). Oilseed rape production declined significantly, yielding 687,000 metric tons in 2024, a 33% decline compared to 2023.
You probably missed it, but a few months ago a report was published that inspected how the UK government prepared for major emergencies. What it found has profound implications for the whole country.
The report was written by the UK’s public inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic and explained how the pandemic was an example of what’s called a “non-malicious threat”. These are major threats to our collective security that arise not from hostile intent – like terrorism or war – but as a result of human error, structural failure, or natural disasters. In this instance it was a novel virus that jumped from animals to humans and then rapidly spread.
The pandemic affected everything. Its impact was so severe that it created what the government calls a “whole-system civil emergency”, a rapidly escalating crisis that significantly affected multiple dimensions of the UK’s security, from the health system, through economic stability, to public trust. This was the UK’s greatest security crisis since the second world war. Yet it had nothing to do with armed conflict.
The inquiry found that successive governments grossly underestimated pandemic threats. They were not given the same priority as security threats coming from hostile action, like Russian aggression or terrorism. The subsequent tragedy proved how much of a mistake this was. When it came to planning and responding to whole-system civil emergencies, the UK government “failed their citizens”, the inquiry said, before concluding that “fundamental reform” was needed.
We have worked on a new report that finds worrying similarities to another, even greater “non-malicious threat” to security: climate change.
Compounding climate risks
Two weeks ago Hurricane Helene crashed into Florida and proceeded to cut a chaotic swathe north. By the time it dissipated over Tennessee two days later, over 200 people were dead and losses amounted to tens of billions of dollars.
Now Florida has been battered by Hurricane Milton too, which may prove to be more destructive in part because it came in the wake of Helene. Much of the region’s road, rail, and power infrastructure was still damaged. Many of the buildings still standing had been seriously weakened. Piles of debris from the clean up quickly became dangerous projectiles in Milton’s powerful winds. Hurricanes such as Helene and Milton are now twice as likely given climate change.
From hurricanes to deadly heatwaves, crippling droughts to crop failures – the consequences of climate change are potentially catastrophic. And while we have improved our resilience to individual extreme weather events, increasing climate change makes it more likely that impacts will pile up with the sum of loss and damages being much higher than the parts. It is these cascading and compounding impacts that not only threaten local communities, but add up to destabilise the security of entire countries and the globalised systems that connect them.
Yet many governments do not routinely consider extreme climate scenarios in their security plans, and instead continue to assume that climate risks will gradually evolve over the long term.
This approach is proving to be grossly insufficient. Take food security for example. Cascading climate effects are estimated to have caused a third of UK food price inflation in recent years, an impact compounded by rising energy prices. Spiking energy prices were the result of our reliance on fossil fuels, which became far more expensive after Russia invaded Ukraine.
These episodes show us how the causes and consequences of climate change supercharge the world’s security problems.
Tipping towards catastrophe
These climate risks create the potential for further “whole-system civil emergencies”. One example is tipping points. For instance, one of the Earth’s key ocean current systems is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), which transports vast amounts of heat from the tropics to the northern hemisphere. Yet climate change is weakening the Amoc, a process that could lead it to pass a tipping point and collapse at some point this century, though there is still much debate among climate scientists over exact dates and probabilities.
Collapse would effectively wipe out crop growing in the UK, and devastate food production over much of Europe and North America, while disrupting key weather patterns across the globe. This would be a planetary-scale cataclysm with unmanageable security outcomes. A collapse this century cannot be ruled out without urgent international action to reduce emissions.
Meanwhile, the collapse of a northern section of the Amoc – in the North Atlantic subpolar gyre – could happen much sooner. While less severe, a collapse would upend weather in the UK, destabilising food production, public health, and infrastructure. Evidence suggests that the likelihood of this collapse is alarmingly high – up to a 45% chance of occurring this century – and that it could happen as early as 2040, if not before.
Inadequate assessment
Yet these risks do not appear in the UK government’s national register of security threats. In fact, there isn’t even a dedicated security risk assessment of climate change. The government’s existing climate change risk assessment is not set up to assess broader security threats in the round and is not intended for high level security decision-makers.
There are also important analytical flaws, such as inadequate consideration of cascading and interacting risks like successive hurricanes or a flood that also spreads diseases or disrupts food supplies months later. Individually, these risks might be bearable; together, they could prove unbearable.
Meanwhile, responsibility for climate risks is currently siloed away in non-security departments, marginalising climate change from the top table of decision-making on security.
Thankfully, the new UK government is undertaking a review of its national resilience and security policies. Climate change should be at the heart of its plans. The pandemic inquiry’s findings could represent a warning from a future in which the threat posed by climate change is still not taken seriously in key parts of government.
We face a choice. We can wait until climate impacts spiral out of control, and panicked governments resort to false solutions like more border walls and militarisation. Worryingly, the chances of this are growing as governments continue to effectively fly blind into an increasingly dangerous future. Alternatively, the institutions of government that are intended to protect us against major emergencies can finally act and begin to turn us away from the gathering storm.
