- South Africa had one of the worst climate disasters of 2022 in financial terms, according to a new report.
- Christian Aid ranked the floods in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape among the 10 most expensive climate events of the year.
- It ranks with floods in Pakistan and China, and drought in Europe and Brazil, in terms of total cost.
- South Africa is among the many big carbon emitters that were hit by such disasters, the group points out.
The floods in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape – which killed hundreds and left key services unavailable – also ranked among the most expensive climate events of 2022, according to a new report.
Counting such disasters in terms of insurance cost makes for a list that "leans towards high income countries which often contain infrastructure and homes with greater economic financial value and more of it covered by insurance," said the charity group Christian Aid in its "Counting The Cost 2022: A year of climate breakdown".
That makes places such as Europe and Australia more likely to appear. But, even so, the floods in South Africa ranked high, even before adding in costs such as the closure of Durban's port, or the impact of lost exports when automotive and other manufacturing was halted.
And that may be ascribed to chickens coming home to roost, the charity suggested, citing work by the World Weather Attribution group that "concluded that greenhouse gases and aerosol emissions were partly responsible for the increases in rainfall observed in the region".
South Africa, Christian Aid pointed out, is the largest per-capita greenhouse emitter in Africa, is a major producer of coal, and has emission targets that have been deemed insufficient under the Paris Agreement.
In financial terms, Hurricane Ian (which hit expensive and heavily-insured American properties), Europe's summer of drought (which hit well-insured food production), and the extensive floods in China were all more expensive than South Africa's flooding, Christian Aid found. So were the floods in Pakistan, which displaced millions came with a considerably bigger death toll, floods in eastern Australia, Storm Eunice in Europe, and droughts in Brazil and China.
Not featured on the list of expensive disasters, for lack of insurance impact, were the floods that hit Mali, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Niger in October, or Cyclone Sitrang in Bangladesh, which are thought to have displaced more than a million people each. The long-running drought in the Horn of Africa, which has reduced food supplies for tens of millions, is also not listed, for the same reason.
World leaders must decide how to manage a climate loss-and-damage fund agreed at COP27, said Christian Aid, "and get money flowing into it."