Two Tales of Super-Typhoons and Super-Wealth in Northwest Pacific: Will Global-Warming-Fueled Cyclones Ravage East and Southeast Asia?

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of the typhoons generated in the Northwest Pacific Ocean and affecting East/Southeast Asia on the number of human fatalities using the typhoon data from 1980 to 2016 and whether future typhoons, likely more intense due to global warming, will dramatically increase human fatalities. The best-track data and the tropical cyclone (TC) reports show that there was no change in the intensity of cyclones during this time period, nor in the number of fatalities. An application of a negative binomial count-data model of the number of TC fatalities shows that the number of fatalities increases by 1.8 percent in response to a one-unit increase in TC intensity, expressed in terms of the minimum central pressure (MCP), but the number of fatalities also decreases by 0.53 percent in response to a one-unit increase in income per capita. In the future year 2100, a 5 millibar decrease in MCP, i.e., an increase in TC intensity, is predicted to increase the number of fatalities by 9 percent from the present fatality value, while a 10 millibar decrease to increase it by 18 percent. However, an increase in income per capita by 1 percent annually coupled with a 10 millibar decrease in the MCP is predicted to decrease the number of fatalities by 59 percent of the present number of fatalities. A surprisingly high income elasticity in the Northwest Pacific is attributed to the difference between Japan and the Philippines, two island nations both heavily affected by typhoons. The income per capita in Japan is more than 20 times than that of the Philippines, which makes the historical number of fatalities in each cyclone landfall more than 20 times smaller in the former, due to superb historical adaptations.