Connect with us

Published

on

Wasted food – if it were a country – would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

Reducing food waste can help to cut down on these emissions, feed those who are hungry and improve food security.

Food waste experts tell Carbon Brief that “food loss and waste” remains a “major issue”. 

There are a range of solutions to tackle the problem, they say, but more action is needed to put such actions in place.

This in-depth Q&A outlines why wasted food causes emissions, why it has become such a big issue and how countries and companies plan to slash waste in the years ahead.

What is food loss and waste?

Around one-third of all food goes to waste during different steps of the production process – from farm, to truck, to fridge.

Food “loss”, according to the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) 2021 food waste index report, is defined as all of the edible parts of food that end up discarded in early parts of the supply chain – for example, vegetables that rot in fields before being picked, crops hit by disease and meat that spoils due to lack of transport refrigeration.

These losses occur before the food reaches supermarkets. Around 15% of food produced globally is lost during harvest or slaughter, a 2021 WWF-UK report found.

Food “waste” refers to the discarding of food and the inedible parts of food that are not consumed by people at a retail, food service or household level. This waste can end up in landfill, compost or animal feed.

The vast majority of food waste goes to landfill. As this food breaks down over time, it generates greenhouse gases, primarily methane. (See: Why is food waste a climate issue?)

The chart below shows that the majority of supply chain and household food loss and waste is considered sufficiently edible.

Estimates of food loss and waste data show that, by weight, approximately 90% of food loss and waste in the supply chain (left) is edible (green) and 10% is inedible (brown). Approximately 70% of household (right) wasted food is edible and 30% is inedible. Source: US Environmental Protection Agency (2021).

A 2020 World Bank report said that reducing food loss and waste can “make a profound difference” for multiple challenges – reducing hunger, strengthening economies and protecting the environment.

In addition to avoiding greenhouse gas emissions, shifts and reductions in food loss and waste can “promote environmental co-benefits” for biodiversity along with soil and water health, a recent study noted.

Dr Christian Reynolds, a food loss and waste expert and a reader in food policy at the Centre for Food Policy in City, University of London, says waste is a constant struggle because “everybody’s got to eat and food degrades”. He tells Carbon Brief: 

“Food loss and waste is a major issue for us as a civilisation to tackle. But it’s something that we’ve been trying to tackle for a long time.”

The UNEP report estimates that food waste from households, retail and the food service industry amounts to 931m tonnes every year. Of this, 61% comes from households, 26% from food service and 13% from retail.

Where does food go after it is wasted?

The majority of food loss and waste ends up in landfills, where it produces methane. Food is the most common material put into landfill and incineration in the US, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Incinerating waste results in a lower greenhouse gas impact than allowing it to decompose in a landfill.

Composting food waste also has a smaller environmental impact, resulting in 38-84% fewer emissions compared to landfill, a 2023 Nature study found.

The image below shows the EPA’s “food recovery hierarchy”, an inverted pyramid highlighting the most to least preferred options when dealing with excess food.

The most favourable option is to reduce the amount of extra food produced in the first place. The “last resort” choice is to dispose through landfill or incineration. Composting is the second “least preferred” option.

“Food recovery hierarchy” showing the most preferred (purple) to least preferred (grey) options to prevent and divert wasted food. Source: EPA (2023).
“Food recovery hierarchy” showing the most preferred (purple) to least preferred (grey) options to prevent and divert wasted food. Source: EPA (2023).

Dr Dawn King, a senior lecturer in environment and society at Brown University in Rhode Island, says that the main priority for food waste should be, as outlined by the EPA, to “get food to people who are hungry”.

Composting often requires either an organised pickup or a garden to compost at home, she tells Carbon Brief, so it is not always an available option for households.

Individuals can take action on food waste in other ways, but options can be limited, Reynolds says. He tells Carbon Brief:

“For both dietary change and for food loss and waste, there is an individualisation of responsibility to some degree. But, also at the same point, there are some system drivers for this.

“An individual can decide what portion and pack size of something they purchase. However, they can’t decide what portion and pack sizes are on display in the supermarket.”

Why is food waste a climate issue?

Producing food in general – particularly meat and dairy – requires a significant amount of land, water and other resources. It is also often costly to produce.

The global food system from production through to consumption is responsible for around one-third of the world’s annual human-caused emissions.

Greenhouse gases from wasted food account for around half of these emissions, a 2023 study found.

The study said that, in 2017, global food waste resulted in 9.3bn tonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2e) emissions – roughly the same as the total combined emissions of the US and the EU that same year.

As food breaks down in landfill, it generates methane – a potent greenhouse gas. Per unit of mass, methane is 84-86 times stronger than CO2 over 20 years and 28-34 times as powerful over 100 years.

The table below shows a WWF-UK analysis of how different commodities, such as fruit, vegetables and meat, contribute to the global level of food waste.

Commodity Volume of waste
(million tonnes)³
% of total production Value of waste
($million)⁴
Fruit & vegetables 449 26% 160,157
Roots, tubers & oil crops 261 15% 44,095
Meat & animal products 153 12% 99,738
Cereals & pulses 196 14% 56,199
Fish & Seafood 25 44%
Other 90 6% 8,930

The contribution of different food commodity types to the global volume of food waste (in millions of tonnes), the percentage of total production that goes to waste and the value of this waste (in millions of USD). Source: WWF-UK (2021)

It is not only the methane emissions from rotted food that cause an environmental issue. All of the emissions associated with the production of a piece of food that is wasted – from the land used to grow it to the plastic used to package it – could have been avoided if the food was not produced and left to waste.

Food wasted in later stages of the supply chain – such as after it reaches a supermarket shelf or a consumer’s fridge – leads to even more waste due to the extra resources needed for packaging and transportation. (Food transport is not widely considered to majorly contribute to total food emissions, but some research challenges this assumption.)

The EPA says that 560,000 square kilometres of agricultural land is used to produce US food that is lost or wasted each year – an area the size of California and New York combined. This food would provide enough calories to feed more than 150 million people each year, the EPA adds.

Discarded white and red onions left to rot on a farm field in the Region of Lambton Shores, Southwest Ontario, Canada in 2017. Image ID: HHB4KC
Discarded white and red onions left to rot on a farm field in the Region of Lambton Shores, Southwest Ontario, Canada in 2017. Credit: Rubens Alarcon / Alamy Stock Photo.

Another issue to consider is the “carbon opportunity cost” of the land used to grow food, especially high-emitting options, such as meat and dairy. 

In short, if agricultural land used to grow wasted food was instead restored to forest or wild grasslands, the land would be able to store more carbon, with additional benefits for biodiversity.

So tackling and reducing food loss and waste would reduce emissions from across the supply chain and prevent needless resources being used to produce food that does not end up being eaten.

According to the UN, food loss and waste generates around 8% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions each year – around the same as the global tourism industry. This also comes at a time when as many as 783 million people were impacted by hunger in 2022, according to the FAO.

From a climate perspective, the right solutions to waste can help “unlock a fairer, [more] equitable and resilient food system”, says Reynolds.

Reynolds says food waste should be a bigger focus point for governments in their efforts to reduce emissions. He tells Carbon Brief:

“That’s an obvious thing that we could be putting within the NDCs [Nationally Determined Contributions, pledges made by each country under the Paris Agreement] as a piece of policy work to actually highlight food loss and waste reduction as part of the NDCs, and then that would cascade downward.

“There has been some discussion of food loss and waste within the wider climate, but it seems a very obvious pathway that we are not using to our fullest extent.”

What are countries doing to reduce food waste?

Food waste is targeted in a number of different ways through policy, campaigns and individual action.

A global goal to reduce waste forms a key part of the UN’s 12th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) – a set of targets for countries to help tackle climate change, end poverty, improve health and boost economic growth.

One section of SDG 12 aims to halve per-capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels, and also reduce food losses in production and supply chains by 2030.

But many countries have yet to tackle the issue head on in their policy plans relating to climate.

According to a report by the climate-action non-governmental organisation WRAP, 21 countries committed to reducing food loss and/or food waste in their NDCs submitted before the COP27 climate summit last year.

Of the 193 countries that submitted NDCs, nine countries specifically committed to reducing food waste and 14 committed to reducing food losses, the report found.

Several other countries including the UK, South Africa and parts of the EU refer to other policy documents that mention food loss and waste reduction, but the report notes these policies are not directly included in the NDCs.

The UK and EU

The UK government relies on voluntary action to reduce food waste. For example, in recent years a number of UK supermarkets have removed “best before” dates from certain products in an effort to reduce waste.

A “best before” date is used to signify when food is at its peak quality. A “use by” date is a stricter rule noting the timeframe by which food is safe to consume.

Removing “best before” dates from fresh products such as apples, bananas and potatoes could help to “prevent 100,000 tonnes of household food waste”, according to a 2022 WRAP report.

Hovis soft white thick loaf of bread with yellow best before date tag. Image ID: E2AEJW.
Hovis soft white thick loaf of bread with yellow best before date tag. Credit: ACORN 1 / Alamy Stock Photo.

However, in terms of official policies, the UK government recently disposed of plans to make food waste reporting mandatory for some businesses. Campaigners criticised the decision and said these measures could have reduced food prices and helped tackle climate change, the Guardian reported.

Reynolds says this decision was a “real shame and a missed opportunity” for the UK government. He tells Carbon Brief:

“Food loss and waste is being measured by many companies already. The majority of the supermarkets already are doing this, it’s just not publicly disclosed. So I think there is already some of this happening, it’s just that a piece of legislation would have levelled the playing field.”

Dr Carrie Bradshaw, a food waste policy expert and lecturer in law at the University of Leeds, adds that mandatory reporting is a “necessary, but not sufficient, measure to tackle food waste”.

Measures are also taking place in certain EU countries and on a wider scale across the bloc.

The European Commission has proposed setting targets for EU countries to reduce food waste by 10% in processing and manufacturing, and by 30% at retail and household level by 2030.

In France, supermarkets are legally required to donate unsold food instead of letting it go to waste. A similar law exists in Italy.

Bradshaw says there are many “economic, social and environmental implications of food waste”. She tells Carbon Brief:

“Arguably in seeking to tackle food waste, we should be aiming not at absolute reductions…but reducing the broader climate and other environmental impacts of food waste.

“Distributing the costs of food waste reduction fairly across the supply chain remains a real challenge for food waste reduction, and is why measures which take a joined-up, whole supply chain approach are likely to be important. This in turn is a limitation of the more targeted efforts you see in France, China or South Korea.”

The US

Food waste remains a growing problem. In the US, food waste grew by almost 5% between 2016 and 2021.

Research suggests that as much as half of all US food produced is left to rot, fed to livestock or put from field to landfill due to “cosmetic standards”, the Guardian reported.

The US department of agriculture advises a number of ways for farmers to reduce food loss and waste – including partnering with food delivery box services or donating food.

At the end of last year, Congress approved the Food Donation Improvement Act which “expands liability protections for the donation of food and grocery products”. A group of US lawmakers also recently proposed federal legislation aimed to halve food waste by 2030.

Compost Collection at the Greenmarket in Union Square in New York. Image ID: D9REGW.
Compost Collection at the Greenmarket in Union Square in New York. Credit: Richard Levine / Alamy Stock Photo.

On a state level, some states offer tax breaks to farmers and businesses who donate food rather than letting it go to waste. Others are diverting food waste away from landfill.

Certain restaurants, cafés, supermarkets and stadiums in New York City are required to separate food scraps and other organic waste.

Since a composting law took effect in California at the start of 2022, every jurisdiction in the state has been required to provide organic waste collection services for households and businesses.

But there has been “uneven progress” on the goal to redirect food waste away from landfill since the “groundbreaking” law was implemented, the Los Angeles Times reports.

King says that a lot of food waste is “preventable”, but she believes there is a lack of incentive for many farmers to avoid it. In some cases, it is not “economically efficient” for farmers to sell slightly imperfect fruits and vegetables, King adds.

China

A Nature study published in 2021 estimated that about 27% – or 349m tonnes – of food went to waste each year from 2014-18 in China.

In 2020, the Chinese government announced the “clean plate campaign” as a measure to tackle food waste and raise public awareness on food security.

Sally Qiu, a research associate at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, says this campaign, and an anti-food waste law implemented in 2021, form part of China’s wider focus on food waste.

The anti-food waste law is a “code of conduct for different entities – like government, companies, schools, catering services – to improve their food procurement management process”, Qiu tells Carbon Brief.

She notes that the “clean plate campaign” appears to be “coming from a food security standpoint, rather than a climate crisis standpoint”. She adds:

“One of the side effects is that reducing food waste is good for the climate.”

Staff at a local restaurant put up signs with characters saying "Clean Plate Campaign" to urge people against food waste, Yangzhou city, east China's Jiangsu province, 21 August 2020. Image ID: 2EKE6DK.
Staff at a local restaurant put up signs with characters saying “Clean Plate Campaign” to urge people against food waste, Yangzhou city, east China’s Jiangsu province, 21 August 2020. Credit: Sipa US / Alamy Stock Photo.

Qiu says there has not been a substantial evaluation of progress so far on the success of these initiatives. She says:

“It is a very well-intended campaign. They don’t want people to waste things. But, just based on what I have seen so far, it’s more of an ideal rather than a very substantial achievement [in] reducing a lot of food waste.”

China’s action plan to hit peak emissions by 2030 sets out a goal to “put a resolute stop to wasteful behaviours, and work tirelessly to reduce food waste in the catering industry”. Qiu describes this goal as a “turning point” of the Chinese government making the “connection with food waste and climate change”.

Qiu says the campaign and law are a “good start”, but more tangible targets may have a bigger impact. She tells Carbon Brief:

“These laws and initiatives are more like they’re encouraging people to do certain things. But it didn’t really say what the goal [is]. Peaking carbon has a very clear goal of 2030…I think maybe for food waste, they can come back with more empirical research…Maybe they can set a more quantitative target, an evidence-based target.”

The post In-depth Q&A: What food waste means for climate change appeared first on Carbon Brief.

In-depth Q&A: What food waste means for climate change

Continue Reading

Climate Change

What Is the Economic Impact of Data Centers? It’s a Secret.

Published

on

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.

What Is the Economic Impact of Data Centers? It’s a Secret.

Continue Reading

Climate Change

GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget

Published

on

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”.

    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.

    Santa Marta conference: fossil fuel transition in an unstable world

    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

    Continue Reading

    Climate Change

    Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones

    Published

    on

    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).

    Average maximum sustained wind speed (top) and rate of rainfall (bottom) for tropical cyclones in the period leading up to and following landfall. Storms are categorised as: rapidly intensifying with marine heatwaves (red); rapidly intensifying without marine heatwaves (purple); not rapidly intensifying with marine heatwaves (orange); and not rapidly intensifying, without marine heatwaves (blue). Source: Radfar et al. (2026)
    Average maximum sustained wind speed (top) and rate of rainfall (bottom) for tropical cyclones in the period leading up to and following landfall. Storms are categorised as: rapidly intensifying with marine heatwaves (red); rapidly intensifying without marine heatwaves (purple); not rapidly intensifying with marine heatwaves (orange); and not rapidly intensifying, without marine heatwaves (blue). Source: Radfar et al. (2026)

    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

    Continue Reading

    Trending

    Copyright © 2022 BreakingClimateChange.com