Nº 21-63: Climate-Related Disasters and the Death Toll

With climate change accelerating, the frequency of climate disasters is expected to increase in the decades to come. There is ongoing debate as to how different climatic regions will be affected by such an acceleration. In this paper, we describe a model for predicting the frequency of climate disasters and the severity of the resulting number of deaths. The frequency of disasters is described as a Poisson process driven by aggregate CO2 emissions. The severity of disasters is described using a generalized Pareto distribution driven by the trend in regional real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. We predict the death toll for different types of climate disasters based on the projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the population, the regional real GDP per capita, and aggregate CO2 emissions in the "sustainable" and "business-as-usual" baseline scenarios.