Rising climate costs to challenge countries, companies in 2023

Rising climate costs to challenge countries, companies in 2023

In a year marked by yet more climate-linked floods, hurricanes and droughts, governments and companies were forced to look more closely at the financial risks and their exposure to liability.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at the U.N. climate conference in Egypt, where countries reached a landmark agreement to set up a fund to help poor countries cope with climate-fueled disaster costs.

Egypt's COP27 talks did little, however, to address the cause of those disasters – the ever-rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

That kind of slow progress in tackling climate change made vulnerable countries determined to get the so-called Loss and Damage fund approved – after yet another year of extreme weather disasters including record heatwaves from the United States to China, glaciers collapsing in India and Europe, and unending drought pushing millions toward famine in East Africa.

Insurers were feeling the pain, as the year delivered three of the decade's costliest disasters - "dystopian" flooding that delivered $40 billion in damages to Pakistan, a series of deadly summer heatwaves that collectively caused more than $10 billion in losses for Europe, and Hurricane Ian tearing across Florida and South Carolina to the cost of $100 billion, according to risk modeling