Better insurance could effectively mitigate the increase in economic growth losses from U.S. hurricanes under global warming.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 36598974.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.add6616 and PMC identifier 9812378.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Global warming is likely to increase the proportion of intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic. Here, we analyze how this may affect economic growth. To this end, we introduce an event-based macroeconomic growth model that temporally resolves how growth depends on the heterogeneity of hurricane shocks. For the United States, we find that economic growth losses scale superlinearly with shock heterogeneity. We explain this by a disproportional increase of indirect losses with the magnitude of direct damage, which can lead to an incomplete recovery of the economy between consecutive intense landfall events. On the basis of two different methods to estimate the future frequency increase of intense hurricanes, we project annual growth losses to increase between 10 and 146% in a 2°C world compared to the period 1980-2014. Our modeling suggests that higher insurance coverage can compensate for this climate change-induced increase in growth losses.