Attributable costs: integrating event attribution with disaster economics.

Abstract:

This talk presents results from two recent studies using a probabilistic event attribution framework to estimate economic costs, one looking at Hurricane Harvey and the other looking at a series of extreme rainfall events and two droughts in New Zealand. These ‘bottom-up’ estimates of climate change damages suggests far higher costs than those implied by ‘top-down’ estimates derived from integrated assessment models (subsequently used by regulatory assessments). The estimates we obtain are not comprehensive, and almost certainly represent an underestimate of the full economic costs of climate change. Outstanding methological questions remain. However, the paper shows the potential for developing a new stream of information that is relevant to a range of stakeholders and research communities, especially those with an interest in the aggregation of the costs of climate change.