Losses, damages and return period of extreme weather events in the Maltese Islands

Abstract

Full range economic costing of weather disasters tends to be quite challenging. Complete and systematic data on such impacts are often lacking, and most data sets generally tend to underestimate losses. The best estimates made by Hoeppe (2016) for the average global cost of natural disasters worldwide between 1980 and 2014 have caused a total of 1.7 million fatalities and at least $4,200bn damages, including $1,100bn insured losses. Around 65% of the overall losses were due to convective and hydrological events. And what about future trends? Nineteen years ago, William Nordhaus (1997) expressed his dilemma that is still haunting both scientists and economists of today. It relates to the current significant knowledge gaps between the projected increase of temperature (now with high confidence) and its translation into future ecological, economic and social outcomes. Many important sectors still lack a proper description of their future growth dynamics in the presence of such impacts (Hallegatte et al., 2016) and economists often resort to the modeling of long-term economic growth on the basis of current time horizon and climate change scenarios. In doing so, they are neglecting the possibility of potential deviations from presumed model conditions of economic growth, irrespective of whether adverse impacts affect rich economies or those already weakened by various disequilibria or inertia in their readjustment process.