Costs of extreme weather events

The 2021 World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report puts extreme weather and climate action failure as the two most likely occurrences, with climate action failure having the second highest impact, after infectious diseases. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2018 special report (SR1.5) warns of the consequences of various warming scenarios and states that ‘realizing 1.5°C consistent pathways would require rapid and systemic changes on unprecedented scales’. The European Parliament adopted a resolution in 2019, urging climate and environment mainstreaming in all EU policies. With a warming climate, pressure on global food security will increase and the number of extreme weather events will likely grow. On both sides of the Atlantic, the scale and intensity of extreme weather events have increased, with costs totalling a record-breaking US$95 billion in the USA in 2020. For Europe, yearly costs average €11 billion