Photo by NOAA on Unsplash
By Patryk Krych | The World Daily | FEBRUARY 3rd 2022
Over the course of the last four decades, it’s been found that extreme weather events such as flooding and severe storms have cost Europe an approximate sum of €500 billion, according to data published by the European Environment Agency (EEA).
Germany, France and Italy were found to be the worst hit countries in terms of the most money having been spent on extreme weather and climate damages. The data was published on Thursday, and no clear trends could be identified between increasing losses and climate change due to the fact that the majority of economic impacts had a tendency to be connected to a few major weather events.
About 60% of the documented economic losses had been linked to only 3% of the weather events over this recorded period of time.
“There is no clear pattern for the most extreme events – they are still random, to a large extent,” said one of the lead authors of the study, Wouter Vanneuville, of the EEA. “But adaptation is ongoing and is having an impact.”
However, he added that the lack of a trend should not be an invitation to remain calm about the situation – changing our infrastructure to be more resistant to extreme weather as it becomes more common and temperatures continue to rise is imperative.
“The reason we don’t see a trend is not that climate change is not real, but because a lot of actions are going on against climate change. More and more countries are implementing adaptation strategies,” said Vanneuville.
Between the periods of 1980 to 2020, somewhere between 90,000 and 142,000 recorded deaths had been connected with extreme weather – primarily with heatwaves, which had been particularly bad in recent years.
