How Much Does Extreme Weather Currently Cost?

I was curious how much extreme weather currently costs so I did a bit of googling and made a visualization of the best results I could find.

There's a good bit of analysis on how much global warming will cost (examples). You also hear regularly about how expensive specific weather events are (e.g., Hurricane Sandy cost ~$71 billion). What I haven't seen is how much weather events cost the world as a whole on average.

The best collection of this information that I could find is the Global Climate Risk Index. The name seems like a misnomer to me because I would assume this is a ranking of countries by climate risk going forward. Instead, it is a ranking of countries by how badly they were impacted by weather/climate over the past 20 years.

One of the metrics that they have is 'Losses per unit GDP in %' which is the loss from weather as a percentage of the country's GDP. I put together a simple visualization of this in Tableau:



This visualization is the easiest way for me to interact with the data.

Taking the GDP for each country from the IMF (from here) and multiplying it by the % lost, you find that ~$150 billion was lost, which is ~0.2% of the total world's GDP. For another compare, that's ~8 NASA's and ~1 US Navy.

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