SDG 13 | climate action
Meteorological catastrophes left losses of 60,967 million euros in Spain
142,000 people deceased. This is the mark that climate change has left on the European population in the last forty years. Floods, storms, heat waves, all of them extreme climatic phenomena that have left their impact on the Old Continent with devastated areas, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA), which has put a number on these losses.
The majority of deaths (more than 85%) in the period 1981-2020 were caused by heat waves. Precisely, the heat wave of 2003, which broke all records and brought the mercury in the thermometer to 40ºC throughout Spain, caused the greatest number of deaths, representing between 50% and 75% of all deaths due to related events. with the climate in the last four decades.
Alone, in this period calculated by the EEA, Germany lost 42,394 lives due to these extreme phenomena, France, 26,775; Italy, 21,603; and, Spain, 16,181. However, the community body, citing the World Meteorological Organization, “the number of climate-related disasters has increased globally in the last 50 years, causing more damage but fewer deaths.”
However, this reduction occurs, not because of a lesser virulence of extraordinary phenomena, but is due “to the improvement of early warnings and disaster management, the number of deaths was reduced almost three times,” explains the Organization. World Weather.
The economic bill
A count to which, in addition, we must add the economic damage. 509,438,000,000 euros or half a billion of the community currency. This is the total bill for climate change over the last forty years.
In absolute terms, the greatest economic losses were recorded in Germany (107,572 million), France (98,994 million), Italy (90,061 million) and Spain (60,976 million).
Meteorological catastrophes left losses of 60,967 million euros in Spain
The data compiled by the European Environment Agency reflects the growth in losses, although “a linear growing trend is not observed,” adds the community report. In the 1980s, “corrected for inflation” -they say-, the recorded losses reached 77,265 million euros, an invoice that almost doubled in the following ten years, reaching 126,492 million and reaching 164,021 million euros. between 2010 and 2020. The total losses calculated by the EEA in the 21st century now reach 305,679 million euros.
In addition, the number of events per decade also follows an increasing trend, with 392, 483, 799, and 1,220 weather and climate events recorded for the decades 1981-1990, 1991-2000, 2001-2010, and 2011-2020, respectively.
The impact of these phenomena, which is expected to increase due to climate change, must be monitored to inform political actors, so that they can improve adaptation and risk reduction measures “to minimize damage and loss of life human”, they recall in the report.
Reduce total cost
Despite the fact that the total loss bill continues to increase year after year and decade after decade, the European Union focuses on mitigating these phenomena to reduce the total bill. “Increasing insurance coverage can be a key tool,” says the EEA.
The study highlights that around 23% of the total losses were insured, although within the continent large oscillations were recorded: from 1% of the countries of Romania and Lithuania to 55% of the Netherlands and 56% of Denmark.
In addition, “adopting climate measures in line with a scenario of a temperature increase of 1.5°C instead of 3°C could avoid up to 60,000 deaths per year due to heat waves and prevent losses due to drought of 20,000 million euros per year. year by the end of this century”, recalls the European Environment Agency.