Countrywide climate features during recorded climate-related disasters

Elisabeth Tschumi,Jakob Zscheischler

doi:10.1007/s10584-019-02556-w

Elisabeth Tschumi, Jakob Zscheischler

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02556-w

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Abstract

Climate-related disasters cause substantial disruptions to human societies. With climate change, many extreme weather and climate events are expected to become more severe and more frequent. The International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) records climate-related disasters associated with observed impacts such as affected people and economic damage on a country basis. Although disasters are classified into different meteorological categories, they are usually not linked to observed climate anomalies. Here, we investigate countrywide climate features associated with disasters that have occurred between 1950 and 2015 and have been classified as droughts, floods, heat waves, and cold waves using superposed epoch analysis. We find that disasters classified as heat waves are associated with significant countrywide increases in annual mean temperature of on average 0.13 ∘C and a significant decrease in annual precipitation of 3.2%. Drought disasters show positive temperature anomalies of 0.08 ∘C and a 4.8 % precipitation decrease. Disasters classified as droughts and heat waves are thus associated with significant annual countrywide anomalies in both temperature and precipitation. During years of flood disasters, precipitation is increased by 2.8 %. Cold wave disasters show no significant signal for either temperature or precipitation. We further find that climate anomalies tend to be larger in smaller countries, an expected behavior when computing countrywide averages. In addition, our results suggest that extreme weather disasters in developed countries are typically associated with larger climate anomalies compared to developing countries. This effect could be due to different levels of vulnerability, as a climate anomaly needs to be larger in a developed country to cause a societal disruption. Our analysis provides a first link between recorded climate-related disasters and observed climate data, which is an important step towards linking climate and impact communities and ultimately better constraining future disaster risk.

Highlights

Disasters lead to thousands of lost lives every year and billions of dollar in damages (Guha-Sapir et al 2017; Handmer et al 2012)
We focus on disasters that are classified as being related to precipitation and temperature extremes, namely droughts, floods, heat waves, and cold waves
Climate-related disasters classified as droughts, floods, and heat waves are associated with significant countrywide anomalies (p < 0.01) in temperature and precipitation during the year of the event (Fig. 4)

Summary

Introduction

Disasters lead to thousands of lost lives every year and billions of dollar in damages (Guha-Sapir et al 2017; Handmer et al 2012). The disaster risk community argues that vulnerability, for instance related to culture, social systems, or governance, is at least as important as the hazard component for determining disaster risk, albeit much less understood and quantified (Blaikie et al 2004; Peduzzi 2019). Given these different assessments, there is still a wide gap between the information climate scientists provide and its application and usefulness for efforts aiming at disaster risk reduction

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Discussion

Conclusion