Developed countries have poured billions of dollars into railways across Asia, solar projects in Africa and thousands of other climate-related initiatives overseas, according to a joint investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian.
A group of nations, including much of Europe, the US and Japan, is obliged under the Paris Agreement to provide international “climate finance” to developing countries.
This financial support can come in forms such as grants and loans from various sources, including aid budgets, multilateral development banks (MDBs) and private investments.
The flagship climate-finance target for more than a decade was to hit “$100bn a year” by 2020, which developed countries met – albeit two years late – in 2022.
Carbon Brief and the Guardian have analysed data across more than 20,000 global climate projects funded using public money from developed nations, including official 2021 and 2022 figures, which have only just been published.
The data provides a detailed insight into how the $100bn goal was reached, including funding for everything from sustainable farming in Niger to electricity projects in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
With developed countries now pledging to ramp up climate finance further, the analysis also shows how donors often rely on loans and private finance to meet their obligations.
- The $100bn target was reached in 2022, boosted by private finance and the US
- Relatively wealthy countries – including China and the UAE – were major recipients
- A tenth of all direct climate finance went to Japan-backed rail projects
- There was funding for more than 500 clean-power projects in African countries
- Some ‘least developed’ countries relied heavily on loans
- US shares in development banks significantly inflated its total contribution
- Adaptation finance still lags, but climate-vulnerable countries received more
- Methodology
The $100bn target was reached in 2022, boosted by private finance and the US
A small handful of countries have consistently been the top climate-finance donors. This remained the case in 2021 and 2022, with just four countries – Japan, Germany, France and the US – responsible for half of all climate finance, the analysis shows.
Not only was 2022 the first year in which the $100bn goal was achieved, it also saw the largest ever single-year increase in climate finance – a rise of $26.3bn, or 29%, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
(It is worth noting that while OECD figures are often referenced as the most “official” climate-finance totals, they are contested.)
Half of this increase came from a $12.6bn rise in support from MDBs – financial institutions that are owned and funded by member states. The rest can be attributed to two main factors.
First, while several donors ramped up spending, the US drove by far the biggest increase in “bilateral” finance, provided directly by the country itself.
After years of stalling during the first Donald Trump presidency, when Joe Biden took office in 2021, the nation’s bilateral climate aid more than tripled between that year and the next.
Meanwhile, after years of “stagnating” at around $15bn, the amount of private investments “mobilised” in developing countries by developed-country spending surged to around $22bn in 2022, according to OECD estimates.
As the chart below shows, the combination of increased US contributions and higher private investments pushed climate finance up by nearly $14bn in 2022, helping it to reach $115.9bn in total.
Both of these trends are still pertinent in 2025, following a new pledge made at COP29 by developed countries to ramp up climate finance to “at least” $300bn a year by 2035.
After years of increasing rapidly under Biden, US bilateral climate finance for developing countries has been effectively eliminated during Trump’s second presidential term. Other major donors, including Germany, France and the UK, have also cut their aid budgets.
This means there will be more pressure on other sources of climate finance in the coming years. In particular, developed countries hope that private finance can help to raise finance into the trillions of dollars required to achieve developing countries’ climate goals.
Some higher-income countries – including China and the UAE – were major recipients
The greatest beneficiaries of international climate finance tend to be large, middle-income countries, such as Egypt, the Philippines and Brazil, according to the analysis.
(The World Bank classifies countries as being low-, lower-middle, upper-middle or high-income, according to their gross national income per person.)
Lower-middle income India received $14.1bn in 2021 and 2022 – nearly all as loans – making it by far the largest recipient, as the chart below shows.
Most of India’s top projects were metro and rail lines in cities, such as Delhi and Mumbai, which accounted for 46% of its total climate finance in those years, Carbon Brief analysis shows. (See: A tenth of all direct climate finance went to Japan-backed rail projects.)
As the world’s second-largest economy and a major funder of energy projects overseas, China – classified as upper-middle income by the World Bank – has faced mounting pressure to start officially providing climate finance. At the same time, the nation received more than $3bn of climate finance over this period, as it is still classed as a developing country under the UN climate system.
High-income Gulf petrostates are also among the countries receiving funds. For example, the UAE received Japanese finance of $1.3bn for an electricity transmission project and a waste-to-energy project.
To some extent, such large shares simply reflect the size of many middle-income countries. India received 9% of all bilateral and multilateral climate finance, but it is home to 18% of the global population.
The focus on these nations also reflects the kind of big-budget infrastructure that is being funded.
“Middle-income economies tend to have the financial and institutional capacity to design, appraise and deliver large-scale projects,” Sarah Colenbrander, climate programme director at global affairs thinktank ODI, tells Carbon Brief.
Donors might focus on relatively higher-income or powerful nations out of self-interest, for example, to align with geopolitical, trade or commercial interests. But, as Colenbrander tells Carbon Brief, there are also plenty of “high-minded” reasons to do so, not least the opportunity to help curb their relatively high emissions.
A tenth of all direct climate finance went to Japan-backed rail projects
Japan is the largest climate-finance donor, accounting for a fifth of all bilateral and multilateral finance in 2021 and 2022, the analysis shows.
Of the 20 largest bilateral projects, 13 were Japanese. These include $7.6bn of loans for eight rail and metro systems in major cities across India, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
In fact, Japan’s funding for rail projects was so substantial that it made up 11% of all bilateral finance. This amounts to 4% of climate finance from all sources.
While these rail projects are likely to provide benefits to developing countries, they also highlight some of the issues identified by aid experts with Japan’s climate-finance practices.
As was the case for more than 80% of Japan’s climate finance, all of these projects were funded with loans, which must be paid back. Nearly a fifth of Japan’s total loans were described as “non-concessional”, meaning they were offered on terms equivalent to those offered on the open market, rather than at more favourable rates.
Many Japan-backed projects also stipulate that Japanese companies and workers must be hired to work on them, reflecting the government’s policies to “proactively support” and “facilitate” the overseas expansion of Japanese business using aid.
Documents show that rail projects in India and the Philippines were granted on this basis.
This practice can be beneficial, especially in sectors such as rail infrastructure, where Japanese companies have considerable expertise. Yet, analysts have questioned Japan’s approach, which they argue can disproportionately benefit the donor itself.
“Counting these loans as climate finance presents a moral hazard…And such loans tied to Japanese businesses make it worse,” Yuri Onodera, a climate specialist at Friends of the Earth Japan, tells Carbon Brief.
There was funding for more than 500 clean-power projects in African countries
Around 730 million people still lack access to electricity, with roughly 80% of those people living in sub-Saharan Africa.
As part of their climate-finance pledges, donor countries often support renewable projects, transmission lines and other initiatives that can provide clean power to those in need.
Carbon Brief and the Guardian have identified funding for more than 500 clean-power and transmission projects in African countries that lack universal electricity access. In total, these funds amounted to $7.6bn over the two years 2021-22.
Among them was support for Chad’s first-ever solar project, a new hydropower plant in Mozambique and the expansion of electricity grids in Nigeria.
The distribution of funds across the continent – excluding multi-country programmes – can be seen in the map below.
A lack of clear rules about what can be classified as “climate finance” in the UN climate process means donors sometimes include support for fossil fuels – particularly gas power – in their totals.
For example, Japan counted an $18m loan to a Japanese liquified natural gas (LNG) company in Senegal and roughly $1m for gas projects in Tanzania.
However, such funding accounted for a tiny fraction of sub-Saharan Africa’s climate finance overall, amounting to less than 1% of all power-sector funding across the region, based on the projects identified in this analysis.
Some ‘least developed’ countries relied heavily on loans
One of the most persistent criticisms levelled at climate finance by developing-country governments and civil society groups is that so much of it is provided in the form of loans.
While loans are commonly used to fund major projects, they are sometimes offered on unfavourable terms and add to the burden of countries that are already struggling with debt.
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has shown that the 44 “least developed countries” (LDCs) spend twice as much servicing debts as they receive in climate finance.
Developed nations pledged $33.4bn in 2021 and 2022 to the 44 LDCs to help them finance climate projects. In total, $17.2bn – more than half of the funding – was provided as loans, primarily from Japan, France and development banks.
The chart below shows how, for a number of LDCs, loans continue to be the main way in which they receive international climate funds.
For example, Angola received $216.7m in loans from France – primarily to support its water infrastructure – and $571.6m in loans from various multilateral institutions, together amounting to nearly all the nation’s climate finance over this period.
Oxfam, which describes developed countries as “unjustly indebting poor countries” via loans, estimates that the “true value” of climate finance in 2022 was $28-35bn, roughly a quarter of the OECD’s estimate. This is largely due to Oxfam discounting much of the value of loans.
However, Jan Kowalzig, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam Germany, tells Carbon Brief that, “generally, LDCs receive loans at better conditions” than they would have been able to secure on the open market, sometimes referred to as “concessional” loans.
US shares in development banks significantly raised its total contribution
The US has been one of the world’s top climate-finance providers, accounting for around 15% of all bilateral and multilateral contributions in 2021 and 2022.
Despite this, US contributions have consistently been viewed as relatively low when considering the nation’s wealth and historical role in driving climate change.
Moreover, much of the climate finance that can be attributed to the US comes from its MDB shareholdings, rather than direct contributions from its aid budget.
These banks are owned by member countries and the US is a dominant shareholder in many of them.
The analysis reveals that around three-quarters of US climate finance provided in 2021-22 came via multilateral sources, particularly the World Bank. (For information on how this analysis attributes multilateral funding to donors, see Methodology.)
Among other major donors – specifically Japan, France and Germany – only a third of their finance was channelled through multilateral institutions. As the chart below shows, multilateral contributions lifted the US from being the fifth-largest donor to the third-largest.
While the Trump administration has cut virtually all overseas climate funding and broadly rejected multilateral institutions, the US has not yet abandoned its influential stake in MDBs.
Prior to COP29 in 2024, only MDB funds that could be attributed to developed country inputs were counted towards the $100bn goal, as part of those nations’ Paris Agreement duties.
However, countries have now agreed that “all climate-related outflows” from MDBs – no matter which donor country they are attributed to – will count towards the new $300bn goal.
This means that, as long as MDBs continue extensively funding climate projects, there will still be a large slice of climate finance that can be attributed to the US, even as it exits the Paris Agreement.
Adaptation finance still lags, but climate-vulnerable countries received more
Under the Paris Agreement, developed countries committed to achieving “a balance between adaptation and mitigation” in their climate finance.
The idea is that, while it is important to focus on mitigation – or cutting emissions – by supporting projects such as clean energy, there is also a need to help developing countries prepare for the threat of climate change.
Generally, adaptation projects are less likely to provide a return on investment and are, therefore, more reliant on grant-based finance.
In practice, a “balance” between adaptation and mitigation has never been reached. Over the period of this analysis, 58% of climate finance was for mitigation, 33% was for adaptation and the remainder was for projects that contributed to both goals.
This reflects a preference for mitigation-based financing via loans among some major donors, particularly Japan and France. Both countries provided just a third of their finance for adaptation projects in 2021 and 2022.
However, among some of the most climate-vulnerable countries – including land-locked parts of Africa and small islands – most funding was for adaptation, as the chart below shows.
Among the projects receiving climate-adaptation funds were those supporting sustainable agriculture in Niger, improving disaster resilience in Micronesia and helping those in Somalia who have been internally displaced by “climate change and food crises”.
Methodology
The joint Guardian and Carbon Brief analysis of climate finance includes the bilateral and multilateral public finance that developed countries pledged for climate projects in developing countries. It covers the years 2021 and 2022.
(These “developed” countries are the 23 “Annex II” nations, plus the EU, that are obliged to provide climate finance under the Paris Agreement.)
The analysis excludes other types of funding that contribute to the $100bn climate-finance target for climate projects, such as export credits and private finance “mobilised” by public investments. Where these have been referenced, the figures are OECD estimates. They are excluded from the analysis because export credits are a small fraction of the total, while private finance mobilised cannot be attributed to specific donor countries.
Data for bilateral funding comes from the biennial transparency reports (BTRs) each country submits to the UNFCCC. The lag in official reporting means the most recent figures – published around the end of 2024 and start of 2025 – only go up to 2022.
Many of the bilateral projects recorded by countries do not specify single recipients, but instead mention several countries. These projects have not been included when calculating the amount of finance individual developing countries received, but they are included in the total figures.
The multilateral funding, including projects funded by MDBs and multilateral climate funds, comes from the OECD. Many countries – including developing countries – pay into these institutions, which then use their money to fund climate projects and, in the case of MDBs, raise additional finance from capital markets.
This analysis calculated the shares of the “outflows” from multilateral institutions that can be attributed to developed countries. It adapts the approach used by the OECD to calculate these attributable shares for developed countries as a whole group.
As the OECD does not publish individual donor country shares that make up the total developed-country contribution, this analysis calculated each country’s attributable shares based on shareholdings in MDBs and cumulative contributions to multilateral funds. This was based on a methodology used by analysts at the World Resources Institute and ODI. There were some multilateral funds that could not be assigned using this methodology, which are therefore not captured in each country’s multilateral contribution.
The post Analysis: Seven charts showing how the $100bn climate-finance goal was met appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Seven charts showing how the $100bn climate-finance goal was met
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein wants state lawmakers to rethink tax breaks for data centers. The industry’s opacity makes it difficult to evaluate costs and benefits.
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year into from state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral fund that provides climate and nature finance to developing countries, has raised $3.9 billion from donor governments in its last pledging session ahead of a key fundraising deadline at the end of May.
The amount, which is meant to cover the fund’s activities for the next four years (July 2026-June 2030), falls significantly short of the previous four-year cycle for which the GEF managed to raise $5.3bn from governments. Since then, military and other political priorities have squeezed rich nations’ budgets for climate and development aid.
The facility said in a statement that it expects more pledges ahead of the final replenishment package, which is set for approval at the next GEF Council meeting from May 31 to June 3.
Claude Gascon, interim CEO of the GEF, said that “donor countries have risen to the challenge and made bold commitments towards a more positive future for the planet”. He added that the pledges send a message that “the world is not giving up on nature even in a time of competing priorities”.
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Donors under pressure
But Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental non-profit Campaign for Nature, said the announcement shows “an alarming trend” of donor governments cutting public finance for climate and nature.
“Wealthy nations pledged to increase international nature finance, and yet we are seeing cuts and lower contributions. Investing in nature prevents extinctions and supports livelihoods, security, health, food, clean water and climate,” he said. “Failing to safeguard nature now will result in much larger costs later.”
At COP29 in Baku, developed countries pledged to mobilise $300bn a year in public climate finance by 2035, while at UN biodiversity talks they have also pledged to raise $30bn per year by 2030. Yet several wealthy governments have announced cuts to green finance to increase defense spending, among them most recently the UK.
As for the US, despite Trump’s cuts to international climate finance, Congress approved a $150 million increase in its contribution to the GEF after what was described as the organisation’s “refocus on non-climate priorities like biodiversity, plastics and ocean ecosystems, per US Treasury guidance”.
The facility will only reveal how much each country has pledged when its assembly of 186 member countries meets in early June. The last period’s largest donors were Germany ($575 million), Japan ($451 million), and the US ($425 million).
The GEF has also gone through a change in leadership halfway through its fundraising cycle. Last December, the GEF Council asked former CEO Carlos Manuel Rodriguez to step down effective immediately and appointed Gascon as interim CEO.
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New guidelines
As part of the upcoming funding cycle, the GEF has approved a set of guidelines for spending the $3.9bn raised so far, which include allocating 35% of resources for least developed countries and small island states, as well as 20% of the money going to Indigenous people and communities.
Its programs will help countries shift five key systems – nature, food, urban, energy and health – from models that drive degradation to alternatives that protect the planet and support human well-being by integrating the value of nature into production and consumption systems.
The new priorities also include a target to allocate 25% of the GEF’s budget for mobilising private funds through blended finance. This aligns with efforts by wealthy countries to increase contributions from the private sector to international climate finance.
Niels Annen, Germany’s State Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development, said in a statement that the country’s priorities are “very well reflected” in the GEF’s new spending guidelines, including on “innovative finance for nature and people, better cooperation with the private sector, and stable resources for the most vulnerable countries”.
Aliou Mustafa, of the GEF Indigenous Peoples Advisory Group (IPAG), also welcomed the announcement, adding that “the GEF is strengthening trust and meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities” by placing them at the “centre of decision-making”.
The post GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget
Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify when passing over marine heatwaves can become “supercharged”, increasing the likelihood of high economic losses, a new study finds.
Such storms also have higher rates of rainfall and higher maximum windspeeds, according to the research.
The study, published in Science Advances, looks at the economic damages caused by nearly 800 tropical cyclones that occurred around the world between 1981 and 2023.
It finds that rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones that pass near abnormally warm parts of the ocean produce nearly double – 93% – the economic damages as storms that do not, even when levels of coastal development are taken into account.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new analysis is a “step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future” in an increasingly warm world.
As marine heatwaves are projected to become more frequent under future climate change, the authors say that the interactions between storms and these heatwaves “should be given greater consideration in future strategies for climate adaptation and climate preparedness”.
‘Rapid intensification’
Tropical cyclones are rapidly rotating storm systems that form over warm ocean waters, characterised by low pressure at their cores and sustained winds that can reach more than 120 kilometres per hour.
The term “tropical cyclones” encompasses hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, which are named as such depending on which ocean basin they occur in.
When they make landfall, these storms can cause major damage. They accounted for six of the top 10 disasters between 1900 and 2024 in terms of economic loss, according to the insurance company Aon’s 2025 climate catastrophe insight report.
These economic losses are largely caused by high wind speeds, large amounts of rainfall and damaging storm surges.
Storms can become particularly dangerous through a process called “rapid intensification”.
Rapid intensification is when a storm strengthens considerably in a short period of time. It is defined as an increase in sustained wind speed of at least 30 knots (around 55 kilometres per hour) in a 24-hour period.
There are several factors that can lead to rapid intensification, including warm ocean temperatures, high humidity and low vertical “wind shear” – meaning that the wind speeds higher up in the atmosphere are very similar to the wind speeds near the surface.
Rapid intensification has become more common since the 1980s and is projected to become even more frequent in the future with continued warming. (Although there is uncertainty as to how climate change will impact the frequency of tropical cyclones, the increase in strength and intensification is more clear.)
Marine heatwaves are another type of extreme event that are becoming more frequent due to recent warming. Like their atmospheric counterparts, marine heatwaves are periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures.
Previous research has shown that these marine heatwaves can contribute to a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification. This is because the warm ocean water acts as a “fuel” for a storm, says Dr Hamed Moftakhari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who was one of the authors of the new study. He explains:
“The entire strength of the tropical cyclone [depends on] how hot the [ocean] surface is. Marine heatwave means we have an abundance of hot water that is like a gas [petrol] station. As you move over that, it’s going to supercharge you.”
However, the authors say, there is no global assessment of how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves interact – or how they contribute to economic damages.
Using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) – a database of tropical cyclone paths and intensities – the researchers identify 1,600 storms that made landfall during the 1981-2023 period, out of a total of 3,464 events.
Of these 1,600 storms, they were able to match 789 individual, land-falling cyclones with economic loss data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and other official sources.
Then, using the IBTrACS storm data and ocean-temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the researchers classify each cyclone by whether or not it underwent rapid intensification and if it passed near a recent marine heatwave event before making landfall.
The researchers find that there is a “modest” rise in the number of marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones globally since 1981, but with significant regional variations. In particular, they say, there are “clear” upward trends in the north Atlantic Ocean, the north Indian Ocean and the northern hemisphere basin of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
‘Storm characteristics’
The researchers find substantial differences in the characteristics of tropical cyclones that experience rapid intensification and those that do not, as well as between rapidly intensifying storms that occur with marine heatwaves and those that occur without them.
For example, tropical cyclones that do not experience rapid intensification have, on average, maximum wind speeds of around 40 knots (74km/hr), whereas storms that rapidly intensify have an average maximum wind speed of nearly 80 knots (148km/hr).
Of the rapidly intensifying storms, those that are influenced by marine heatwaves maintain higher wind speeds during the days leading up to landfall.
Although the wind speeds are very similar between the two groups once the storms make landfall, the pre-landfall difference still has an impact on a storm’s destructiveness, says Dr Soheil Radfar, a hurricane-hazard modeller at Princeton University. Radfar, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Hurricane damage starts days before the landfall…Four or five days before a hurricane making landfall, we expect to have high wind speeds and, because of that high wind speed, we expect to have storm surges that impact coastal communities.”
They also find that rapidly intensifying storms have higher peak rainfall than non-rapidly intensifying storms, with marine heatwave-influenced, rapidly intensifying storms exhibiting the highest average rainfall at landfall.
The charts below show the mean sustained wind speed in knots (top) and the mean rainfall in millimetres per hour (bottom) for the tropical cyclones analysed in the study in the five days leading up to and two days following a storm making landfall.
The four lines show storms that: rapidly intensified with the influence of marine heatwaves (red); those that rapidly intensified without marine heatwaves (purple); those that experienced marine heatwaves, but did not rapidly intensify (orange); and those that neither rapidly intensified nor experienced a marine heatwave (blue).
Dr Daneeja Mawren, an ocean and climate consultant at the Mauritius-based Mascarene Environmental Consulting who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new study “helps clarify how marine heatwaves amplify storm characteristics”, such as stronger winds and heavier rainfall. She notes that this “has not been done on a global scale before”.
However, Mawren adds that other factors not considered in the analysis can “make a huge difference” in the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, including subsurface marine heatwaves and eddies – circular, spinning ocean currents that can trap warm water.
Dr Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that, while the intensification found by the study “makes physical sense”, it is inherently limited by the relatively small number of storms that occur. He adds:
“There’s not that many storms, to tease out the physical mechanisms and observational data. So being able to reproduce this kind of work in a physical model would be really important.”
Economic costs
Storm intensity is not the only factor that determines how destructive a given cyclone can be – the economic damages also depend strongly on the population density and the amount of infrastructure development where a storm hits. The study explains:
“A high storm surge in a sparsely populated area may cause less economic damage than a smaller surge in a densely populated, economically important region.”
To account for the differences in development, the researchers use a type of data called “built-up volume”, from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Built-up volume is a quantity derived from satellite data and other high-resolution imagery that combines measurements of building area and average building height in a given area. This can be used as a proxy for the level of development, the authors explain.
By comparing different cyclones that impacted areas with similar built-up volumes, the researchers can analyse how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves contribute to the overall economic damages of a storm.
They find that, even when controlling for levels of coastal development, storms that pass through a marine heatwave during their rapid intensification cause 93% higher economic damages than storms that do not.
They identify 71 marine heatwave-influenced storms that cause more than $1bn (inflation-adjusted across the dataset) in damages, compared to 45 storms that cause those levels of damage without the influence of marine heatwaves.
This quantification of the cyclones’ economic impact is one of the study’s most “important contributions”, says Mawren.
The authors also note that the continued development in coastal regions may increase the likelihood of tropical cyclone damages over time.
Towards forecasting
The study notes that the increased damages caused by marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones, along with the projected increases in marine heatwaves, means such storms “should be given greater consideration” in planning for future climate change.
For Radfar and Moftakhari, the new study emphasises the importance of understanding the interactions between extreme events, such as tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves.
Moftakhari notes that extreme events in the future are expected to become both more intense and more complex. This becomes a problem for climate resilience because “we basically design in the future based on what we’ve observed in the past”, he says. This may lead to underestimating potential hazards, he adds.
Mawren agrees, telling Carbon Brief that, in order to “fully capture the intensification potential”, future forecasts and risk assessments must account for marine heatwaves and other ocean phenomena, such as subsurface heat.
Lin adds that the actions needed to reduce storm damages “take on the order of decades to do right”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“All these [planning] decisions have to come by understanding the future uncertainty and so this research is a step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future.”
The post Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones
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