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Tropical storms

The socio-economics of cyclones

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 343–345 (2016)Cite this article

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Understanding the potential social and economic damage and loss wrought by tropical cyclones requires not only understanding how they will change in frequency and intensity in a future climate, but also how these hazards will interact with the changing exposures and vulnerabilities associated with social change.

On 20 February 2016, tropical cyclone Winston made landfall in Fiji; the strongest cyclone ever recorded to hit the South Pacific nation, with estimated sustained winds of 230 km h−1. For many communities, the consequences of tropical cyclones are cataclysmic. Recent storms such as Sandy (the USA in 2012), Haiyan (the Philippines in 2013) and Pam (Vanuatu in 2015) — which all caused terrible damage — clearly demonstrate this. Writing in Nature Climate Change in 2012, Mendelsohn et al.1 suggested that the dramatic increase in the global impact of tropical cyclones over the past few decades was largely due to an increase in the exposure and vulnerability to cyclones, rather than an increase in their intensity or frequency. They also predicted an increase in damages in some geographic regions associated with future climatic influences. At the same time, Peduzzi and colleagues2 showed that there was a growing awareness that future tropical cyclone occurrences and, most importantly, tropical cyclone mortality would be affected by climatic change, potentially doubling the impacts. It seems that we will be witnessing a trade-off: a global decline in the frequency of cyclones that may go hand-in-hand with an increase in tropical cyclone intensity and, given the non-linearity in damage functions, more extensive aggregate expected damage to assets3.

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  1. Ilan Noy is in the School of Economics and Finance, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand,

    Ilan Noy

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Correspondence to Ilan Noy.

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Noy, I. The socio-economics of cyclones. Nature Clim Change 6, 343–345 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2975

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