1 / 24

Climate change and disaster risk management -- Is the changing climate affecting disaster risk?

Climate change and disaster risk management -- Is the changing climate affecting disaster risk?. Ian Noble ENV Climate Change Team. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 2010 doi : 10.1175/2010BAMS3092.1 Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change?

tyne
Download Presentation

Climate change and disaster risk management -- Is the changing climate affecting disaster risk?

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Climate change and disaster risk management -- Is the changing climate affecting disaster risk? Ian Noble ENV Climate Change Team

  2. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 2010 doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS3092.1 Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change? Laurens M. Bouwer Institute for Environmental Studies, VrijeUniversiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  3. Study Finds No Link Tying Disaster Losses to Human-Driven Warming By ANDREW C. REVKINNYT BBC Summary -- “…according to scientists, up until now, weather-related natural hazards, with their inherent variability, may have not been increasing – it’s the vulnerability of the population that has seen a sharp rise.” NHPR -- The paper “… finds no causal link between increases in disaster losses and man-made climate change.”

  4. Conclusions • The analysis of twenty-two disaster loss studies shows that economic losses from various weather related natural hazards, such as storms, tropical cyclones, floods, and small-scale weather events such as wildfires and hailstorms, have increased around the globe. • The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. • Therefore it can be concluded that anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters. • Considerable uncertainties remain in some of these studies, as exposure and vulnerability that influence risk can only be roughly accounted for over time. • In particular the potential effects of past risk reduction efforts on the loss increase are often ignored, because data that can be used to correct for these effects is not available. “The bottom line? Regardless of what happens due to global warming, on a crowding, urbanizing planet, increased exposure to, and losses from, nature’s hard knocks are a sure thing if people keep settling in harm’s way.” Andrew Revkin

  5. What have we observed?

  6. More and more people are being affected by climate related disasters each decade

  7. We believe that the increase seen in the graph until about 1995 is explained • partly by better reporting of disasters in general, • partly due to active data collection efforts by CRED and • partly due to real increases in certain types of disasters. • We estimate that the data in the most recent decade present the least bias and reflect a real change in numbers. This is especially true for floods and cyclones. Whether this is due to climate change or not, we are unable to say. • CRED (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters)

  8. More and more people are being affected by climate related disasters each decade

  9. Climate related disasters are increasing faster than non-climate disasters

  10. LDCs – governance seems to matterPercent change in people affected per 5 years Area of dot represents number of people affected

  11. What can we learn from climate modelling?

  12. Increase annual max number consecutive dry days (<1 mm) Kamaguchi SOLA 2006

  13. Fraction of annual rainfall falling in extreme events (>95% of current) Blue – Cooler conditions (-3 to 19 °C) Pink – Mild conditions (19 to 29 °C) Red – Hot conditions (29 to 35 °C) Warmer conditions  more moisture in air  heavier ppt events

  14. 1 In 100 year flood returns every 20 years Changes in flood frequency 1 in 20 year flood returns every 6 years

  15. 100-drought frequency 2020Lenher et al 2006 Climatic Change

  16. Cyclone intensityWebster et al 2005 Science 309, 1844

  17. Noda et al Earth Simulator from Oouchi et al 2005 • Cyclone frequency at end of 21st C • Overall frequency will fall but number of intense events will increase But don’t expect much detail on cyclone paths

  18. In a 4 °C scenario, most land surface temperature increases will be well above 4 °C

  19. It is not all about extremes and disasters. Imagine living through summer after summer in an ‘Oslo’ designed house relocated to central Spain

  20. Takeshi Enomoto, Earth Simulator Center/JAMTECCloud representation at 320 km grid (Left) versus 20 km (Right) for the same point in a model run

  21. Seasonal forecasting - NOAA Which “Early Warning Systems” are feasible? • 1, 3 & 5.5 month precipitation forecast • But essentially little useable information beyond 1 month

More Related