Strong rise of Spain in the ranking of the countries most affected by climate change

The outcome of the negotiations taking place these weeks in Madrid will be reflected in the future of millions of people. Experts warn that keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees means reducing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as heat waves, storms, droughts and floods. Natural disasters that have particularly severe effects on the poorest and most vulnerable countries, but which are also increasingly affecting the largest economies.

Spain in particular is one of the countries in which the damages caused by extreme weather events have worsened the most in recent years, according to the Global Climate Risk Index (IRC), presented on Wednesday in Madrid. This annual report, prepared by the NGO Germanwatch, ranks countries according to their vulnerability to extreme weather events.

This year Spain occupies number 38 in the ranking, which is an important jump compared to the previous year (47). “That rise is mainly due to the heavy rains, storms and floods that took place in October in the eastern part of the peninsula and in the Balearic Islands,” says David Eckstein, one of the authors of the paper.

In a second classification included in the report, which takes into account the accumulated records of the last 10 years, Spain goes from position 34 to 29, which confirms a trend towards greater vulnerability. In this sense, the European Environment Agency (EEA) already announced in 2017 that heat waves, floods, droughts and storms would be increasingly frequent and intense throughout the continent and pointed especially to the countries of the south as a “critical point”, being one of the areas that will suffer most intensely the consequences of climate change.

“The index shows that climate change has a disastrous impact on poor countries such as Haiti, the Philippines or Pakistan, which are repeatedly affected by extreme weather events and do not have time to fully recover,” explains Eckstein, “but also causes increasingly serious damage in industrialized countries.”

In 2018 Japan was one of the most affected countries, in human and material losses: according to the report almost 1,300 people died from causes related to extreme weather events, with material damage worth 35,800 million dollars. Germany, which suffered severe heat waves, is also among the ten most affected countries.

Heat waves were precisely one of the main sources of damage in 2018. This week the secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization claimed that periods of extreme temperatures are now up to 100 times more likely than they were a century ago. And Germanwatch experts recall that, due to the lack of data, the effects of such events on the African continent may be underrepresented.

FINANCING MECHANISMS

“The data underscore the importance of reliable financial support mechanisms for poor countries,” says Eckstein, “not only for adaptation to climate change, but also for coping with climate loss and damage.” Financial support for climate losses is, for the first time, high on the agenda at the summit in Madrid.

The most vulnerable countries demand an agreement that allows to sustain in a concrete way – with financing and means – those that are suffering the most from the effects of global warming. “The poorest people and countries are the most affected by the impacts of climate change because they lack the financial and technical capacity to cope with loss and damage,” adds Laura Schaefer, co-author of the report.

Experts from the German NGO recall that seven of the ten countries most affected by climate change in the last two decades are developing states with low or lower average per capita incomes. Specifically, Puerto Rico, Myanmar and Haiti were the most punished if we look at the aggregated data for the period 1999-2018. Over the past 20 years, nearly 500,000 fatalities worldwide have been directly linked to more than 12,000 extreme weather events, with economic damage amounting to approximately $3.54 trillion.

Source: El Mundo