Counting the Cost 2024 A year of climate breakdown

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Economic impacts are generally higher in absolute terms in high income countries - the economic value of infrastructure and homes tends to be higher, living costs are greater and more is covered by insurance - and therefore calculable - in financial terms. On the other hand, the death toll is usually higher in poorer countries.

This first list of “The most expensive climate disasters in 2024” is therefore based on the latest information1 on losses from extreme weather published regularly by Aon. Because the information that is publicly available at the time of writing only covers events from January to September, we have added to the list two recent catastrophic events that have not yet been analysed by the company, namely hurricane Milton and the floods in Valencia. For these events, we have used comparable estimates from other companies (RBC Capital for hurricane Milton and Morningstar DBRS for the Valencia floods).

Most items on the list correspond to individual events, but in two instances, the “China floods” and the “US storms”, the entries refer to several storms and flood events pooled together. In the case of the China floods, the item refers to events across the country that happened in June and July. In the US storms, we merged all storms classified by Aon as “Severe convective storm” and refers to the period between January and September. This does not include those storms classified as hurricanes, i.e. Hurricane Beryl, Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene.

As most of these estimates are based only on insured losses, the first set of events are unsurprisingly storms/cyclones. The true financial costs are likely to be even higher (e.g. losses in crop production, delays in trading), while the human costs are often uncounted. The second list “Other notable climate disaster in 2024” therefore examines more of the slower-onset crises that can be as just as deadly and more often in poorer countries but for which less data is available.

It is also important to note that the impacts and costs of climate events fall disproportionately on those living in poverty in lower income countries. This is because they will have fewer assets, less insurance and generally poorer access to comprehensive public services.

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Last changed: Dec 30 2024 at 7:05 AM