The social costs of tropical cyclones

Abstract

Tropical cyclones (TCs) can adversely affect economic development for more than a decade. Yet, these long-term effects are not accounted for in current estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC), a key metric informing climate policy on the societal costs of greenhouse gas emissions. We here derive temperature-dependent damage functions for 41 TC-affected countries to quantify the country-level SCC induced by the persistent growth effects of damaging TCs. We find that accounting for TC impacts substantially increases the global SCC by more than 20%; median global SCC increases from US$ 173 to US$ 212 per tonne of CO2 under a middle-of-the-road future emission and socioeconomic development scenario. This increase is mainly driven by the strongly TC-affected major greenhouse gas emitting countries India, USA, China, Taiwan, and Japan. This suggests that the benefits of climate policies could currently be substantially underestimated. Adequately accounting for the damages of extreme weather events in policy evaluation may therefore help to prevent a critical lack of climate action.

Accounting for surge dynamics is key to modeling tropical cyclone-induced coastal flooding

“…For the calculation of inundated areas, GeoClaw does not rely on pre-computed global ocean model outputs, which are known to underestimate TCs 30 , and can therefore be used more flexibly for tailored assessments of TC surge impacts. Further, the moderate computational resources required to run the model allow to calculate inundated areas for large ensemble of synthetic storm tracks which have formed the basis for recent assessments of climate risks arising from changes in tropical cyclone climatology with global warming 4,44 .…”

“…In China, the statistical explanatory power in an empirical model has been found to be significantly higher for TC-induced economic impacts and can increase up to 14-fold when considering wind, inland and coastal floods instead of only wind 3 . However, so far global empirical estimates of TC damages use wind-fields as the only hazard predictor and do not account for floods [4][5][6] . This is particularly problematic as the evidence for a relation between climate change and changes in TC wind speeds is rather weak and subject to large uncertainties 7,8 , while the TC-induced flooding is clearly expected to increase under climate change due to sea level rise amplifying coastal flooding and increasing heavy precipitation extending the pluvial and fluvial flooding 9 .…”

Natural Disasters and the Demand for Health Insurance

“…Specifically, it pioneers an inquiry into the causal impacts of cyclones on the uptake of private health insurance (PHI) in Australia -a cyclone-prone nation endowed with a universal public health insurance system. The necessity for a fresh examination of the impact of cyclones on the acquisition of PHI is underscored by the catastrophic nature of cyclones, ranking among the most devastating extreme weather events with the potential to inflict widespread disruption and damage (Krichene et al 2023;Nguyen & Mitrou 2024a). Given their profound societal implications, comprehending the ramifications of cyclones on health insurance demand is imperative for crafting efficacious policies and interventions aimed at supporting affected populations.…”