A male strolls through the floods towards damaged homes in Schuld near Bad Neuenahr, western Germany, on July 15, 2021.
Bernd Lauter|AFP|Getty Images
Climate impacts the “economic growth story” and needs a reaction at the regional, local and global level, an environment researcher has actually informed CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe”.
Anders Levermann, who is head of the intricacy science research study department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, was speaking after a current research study released in the journal Nature discovered financial development falls when the quantity of “wet days and days with extreme rainfall” increases.
Scientists at PIK took a look at information from over 1,500 areas in between 1979 and2019 In a declaration last month, PIK stated the analysis recommended that “intensified daily rainfall driven by climate-change from burning oil and coal will harm the global economy.”
The peer-reviewed research study was led by Leonie Wenz, from PIK and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change.
“Economies across the world are slowed down by more wet days and extreme daily rainfall — an important insight that adds to our growing understanding of the true costs of climate change,” she stated.
“While more annual rainfall is generally good for economies, especially agriculturally dependent ones, the question is also how the rain is distributed across the days of the year,” she included.
“Intensified daily rainfall turns out to be bad, especially for wealthy, industrialized countries like the US, Japan, or Germany,” Wenz stated. PIK highlighted both the service and production sectors as being especially impacted.
Challenges associated to extreme, heavy rain seem here for the foreseeable future. According to the U.K.’s nationwide meteorological service, the Met Office, as “global temperatures rise, the number of extreme rainfall days is expected to increase.”
Last summer season, for instance, heavy rain resulted in serious flooding in a variety of European nations, triggering deaths along with considerable damage to structures and facilities.
In action to what it called “catastrophic flooding and heavy rain”, Germany’s federal government stated it would supply as much as 30 billion euros (around $343 billion) to help parts of the nation impacted by the flooding.
During an interview with CNBC at the end of recently, PIK’s Levermann looked for to highlight a few of the research study’s primary takeaways.
“What we found … is that even small changes in the number of rainy days can already impact the growth rate of the economy,” he stated.
“It’s the change in variability, the things we’re not used to, that really hit us strongest,” Levermann later on stated, including that this was “difficult to adapt to.”
He likewise highlighted the requirement for a systemic shift over the coming years. “We understand what the shift from a … fossil energy system to [a] eco-friendly [one] will cost us, and it is a shift,” he stated.
“We have to set the path straight so that people can actually adapt to it and make money out of doing the transition quicker than their competitors.”
It would, Levermann concluded, “always be more expensive to let climate change evolve than to combat it.”
