New Paper Accepted: Normalised Insurance Losses from Australian Natural Disasters: 1966-2017

We have just had a new paper accepted for publication:

McAneney, J., B. Sandercock, R. Crompton, T. Mortlock, R. Musulin, R. Pielke, Jr., and A. Gissing. (2020, in press). Normalised Insurance Losses from Australian Natural Disasters: 1966-2017, Environmental Hazards.

Here is the bottom line: When aggregated by season, there is also no significant trend in normalised losses. This is also true if only weather-related event losses are considered; in other words, after we normalise weather-related losses for changes that we know to have taken place, no residual signal remains to be explained by changes in the occurrence of extreme weather events, regardless of cause. In sum, the rising cost of natural disasters is being driven by where and how we chose to live and with more people living in vulnerable locations with more to lose, natural disasters will remain an important problem irrespective of a warming climate.

Details after the break …

Here is the abstract

Here are the top 10 normalized losses in the dataset:

Here is the overall data, before (top) and after normalization (bottom), for all events in the dataset. At the top of this post in the dataset of weather-related events (e.g., no earthquakes). The full paper has the methods described in detail.