Stellar Snippets
A recent study in the Nature Communications journal estimates that the global climate crisis has cost society close to $391 million a day.
Damages from wildfires, heatwaves, and other events have cost an average of $143 billion a year between 2000 and 2019, peaking in the years 2008, 2003, and 2010.
63% of this cost has been due to the loss of human lives, and the rest due to damages to property and other assets.
Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar took over 80,000 lives and heatwaves in continental Europe have also resulted in the loss of 70,000 lives.
The global temperatures continue to rise as experts recorded 2023 as the hottest summer on record with a significant margin.
The research notes the difficulty of accurately measuring the full costs of climate change, as indirect losses, such as mental health impacts, are hard to quantify.
The research also estimates the loss per life at $7.08 million. Nearly 12,000 reported disasters resulted in 2 million deaths since 1970.
Though governments agreed to limit global heating to below 2° Celcius (35.6° Fahrenheit) at the Paris Climate Accord, this is proving to be a difficult task.