Economic losses due to natural disasters estimated at $60B in 2003

Natural disasters, the lion’s share of which were weather-related catastrophes, cost the world over $60 billion in 2003, up from around $55 billion the year before.

The high economic losses, highlighted in a report by experts with the Finance Initiative of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), are part of a worrying trend that is being linked with climate change.

UNEP is calling on governments, business and industry to back emerging emissions-trading markets as one way of tackling the crisis. The extreme summer heat wave, in which crops and livestock wilted across many parts of Europe and some 20,000 people were killed, is expected to have been the most costly single event 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. Some 650,000 apartments were damaged with overall losses estimated at nearly $8 billion. The biggest insured losses were in the United States, where a series of tornadoes ripped through the Midwest in April and May leaving a trail of destructions in their wake. They are calculated to have cost insurers more than $3 billion.

These are just some of the preliminary "snapshot" findings from Munich Re, one of the world’s biggest re-insurance companies, which has been tracking the economic and insured losses as a result of natural and weather-related catastrophes since the 1950s.

Thomas Loster, head of Weather/Climate Risks Research at the company and head of the Climate Change Working Group of the UNEP Finance Initiative, said that the years of the late 1990 and early 21st Century had been marked by increasingly "extreme" weather and climate-related events.

Klaus Toepfer, executive director of UNEP, added: "Climate change is not a prognosis, it is a reality that is, and will increasingly bring human suffering and economic hardship. Developed countries have a responsibility to reduce their emissions, but also have a responsibilty to help developing countries adapt to the impacts of global warming."