Climate Change Caused $4 Billion of Typhoon’s Damage

A new wave of attribution research links the economic cost of weather events to climate change

CLIMATEWIRE | Scientists have found the fingerprint of global warming on Typhoon Hagibis, a monster cyclone that swept through Japan in 2019, killing around a hundred people and damaging thousands of homes.

A new study — published Wednesday in the journal Climatic Change — found that the storm was about 67 percent more likely to happen than it would have been in a world without climate change. Researchers also went a step further, and translated the influence of warming into economic costs: Of the $10 billion Typhoon Hagibis caused in damages, they estimate that about $4 billion can be attributed to climate change.

In other words, if global warming weren’t happening, the storm would have been far less destructive.

“We focused on this specific event because Hagibis was one of the most damaging storms in Japan’s history,” said lead study author Sihan Li, a senior research associate at Oxford University.

In fact, it was likely even more damaging than the new study suggests. The research looks only at costs associated with insured losses. It doesn’t include the variety of costs that may be associated with other consequences of the storm, including loss of life and well-being.

The study is the latest addition to a popular field of research known as attribution science. The field specializes in uncovering the influence of climate change on individual weather events, like hurricanes, heat waves, floods and wildfires.

While attribution science is a relatively young field — it got its start only about two decades ago — it has rapidly advanced in recent years. There are hundreds of peer-reviewed attribution studies published in the scientific literature today. Scientists can now investigate almost any type of climate-related disaster, and they’ve gotten faster at it, as well.


A new wave of attribution research links the economic cost of weather events to climate change