Environment

The World’s Insurance Bill from Natural Disasters This Year: $115 Billion
Extreme weather events have caused an estimated $115 billion in insured financial losses around the world this year according to Swiss Re, the Zurich-based reinsurance giant. That’s 42 percent higher than the 10-year average of $81 billion.
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Renewable Power’s Growth Is Being Turbocharged as Countries Seek Energy Security
The global energy crisis has triggered unprecedented momentum behind renewables, with the world set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the past 20
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Global Warming Doubled the Risk for Copenhagen’s historic 2011 Cloudburst
On 2 July 2011, the Danish capital Copenhagen suffered a cloudburst of historic proportions, causing damage and destruction costing billions of kroner. Researchers have used detailed weather models to clearly tie increased temperatures to that historic cloudburst.
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Major Global Security Challenges
What are the major threats the world is facing? Researchers highlight five such threats: The growing role of disinformation; attacks on the idea of democracy; environmental challenges; economic instability; and terrorism – both domestic and foreign.
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Probable Maximum Flood Events Will Significantly Increase Over Next Decades
The flood capacity of dams could be at greater risk of being exceeded due to out-of-date modelling for potential maximum rainfall. A new study concludes that the rainfall model that engineers use to help design critical infrastructure such as large dams and nuclear power plants need to be updated to account for climate change.
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With Climate Impacts Growing, Insurance Companies Face Big Challenges
The impacts of climate change are all around us: sea level rise, severe heat waves, drought, extreme rainfall, more powerful storms. These impacts are making natural disasters more intense and more frequent. Losses from each disaster—drought and wildfires in the southwest, severe storms in the Midwest, flooding in Kentucky and Missouri, and hurricanes in the southeast—have exceeded $1 billion, with the cumulative cost of disasters over the last five years reaching $788.4 billion.
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Earth Had its 4th-Warmest October on Record
The planet added another warm month to a warm year, with October 2022 ranking as the world’s fourth-warmest October in 143 years. The Northern Hemisphere saw its second-warmest October and Europe saw its warmest October on record.
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Sea-Level Rise “May Cross Two Meters by 2100”
Land subsidence could worsen sea-level rise effects in the Asia Pacific region. Most islands in the Pacific are subsiding, presenting a challenge to infrastructure. Pacific Island Countries have low adaptative capacity to climate change.
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A Decade After Sandy, Manhattan’s Flood Barrier Is Finally in Sight — Sort of
In the wake of the October 2012 Superstorm Sandy, an ambitious project, called the “Big U,” was launched, aiming to wrap the island of Manhattan in miles of berms and artificial shorelines, creating a huge grassy shield that would both increase urban green space and defend the city from storm surge. The “Big U” shows how climate adaptation can succeed. It also shows how hard it is.
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As the Planet Warms, Risks of Geoengineering the Climate Mount
Because a climate-disrupted future remains possible, another danger needs our attention. As the impacts of warming become more extreme, countries are more likely to turn to riskier measures to combat them, including geoengineering.
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Managing Water Resources in a Low-to-No-Snow Future
With mountain snowpacks shrinking in the western U.S., new Berkeley Lab study analyzes when a low-to-no-snow future might arrive and implications for water management.
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Extreme Weather Events Do Not Lead to Policy Change
Extreme weather events and natural disasters, which result in hundreds of billions of dollars in damages and thousands of lives lost, are not associated with climate policy reforms.
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Texas’ Plan to Provide Water for a Growing Population Ignores Climate Change
Texas’ biggest single solution to providing enough water for its soaring population in the coming decades is using more surface water, including about two dozen new large reservoirs. But climate change has made damming rivers a riskier bet.
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Climate Change-Driven Heat Waves Have Cost Global Economy Trillions Since the 1990s
Massive economic losses due to sweltering temperatures brought on by human-caused climate change are not just a problem for the distant future. A new study has found that more severe heat waves resulting from global warming have already cost the world economy trillions of dollars since the early 1990s. The study says that measures protecting people on hottest days are needed now.
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Hydropower Delivers Electricity, Even During Lengthy Droughts
The megadrought in the Southwestern United States is the driest—and longest—in the last 1,200 years, depleting water reservoir levels to critically low levels over the past 22 years. Droughts particularly impact hydroelectric power dams as well as some thermoelectric power plants that require large amounts of water for cooling. But a new report suggests that the relationship between drought and hydroelectric power is more nuanced than it might seem. Drought-strained hydropower sustains 80 percent average power generation capacity.
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