AC
André C. S. Batalhão
Professor, Minas Gerais State University, Brazil
2024 was the warmest year in the 175-year instrumental record, the first calendar year to cross 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average, and also the year in which extreme weather displaced more people than in any of the previous sixteen. Those two facts belong together. The World Meteorological Organization's State of the Global Climate 2024 report counted 605 significant extreme weather events worldwide, 148 of them classed as unprecedented, which between them displaced some 824,500 people, killed roughly 1,700 and injured 1.1 million more. None of this is confined to one country or one kind of hazard. Floods in Spain, cyclones in Mozambique, wildfires in Canada and heatwaves across South Asia and Europe now read as chapters of the same story rather than unrelated headlines.
The financial reckoning is just as stark. Munich Re, the reinsurer whose business depends on getting these numbers right, put global losses from natural catastrophes at 320 billion US dollars in 2024, up from 268 billion the year before; only 140 billion of that was insured, leaving the rest to fall on households, farms and governments least able to absorb it. Weather-related catastrophes, rather than earthquakes or other geophysical events, accounted for the overwhelming majority of both figures. Hurricane Helene alone caused an estimated 56 billion dollars in damage across the south-eastern United States, and Hurricane Milton a further 38 billion, arriving within weeks of each other. In Valencia, autumn floods killed 224 people in a single province. Cyclone Chido displaced around 100,000 people across Mozambique and neighbouring states. None of these events happened in isolation from the warming ocean and atmosphere that fed them.
What makes 2024 instructive rather than merely alarming is how unevenly the damage fell, and how much of that unevenness was avoidable. Wealthy countries lost more in absolute dollar terms, but poorer ones lost far more relative to what they had. Over the past fifty years, weather, water and climate hazards have killed more than two million people, and 90 per cent of those deaths occurred in developing countries, even though the wealthiest nations experienced a disproportionate share of the economic losses. That asymmetry is not an accident of geography; it reflects which countries can afford sea walls, air conditioning and hospitals with spare capacity, and which cannot.
Heat remains the hazard people underestimate most consistently, because it kills quietly and its victims rarely make the news the way flood victims do. Cities from Ahmedabad to Athens have adopted heat action plans built around the same basic logic: name a threshold temperature, trigger a coordinated response above it, and make sure the response reaches people who work outdoors or live without cooling. Where these plans exist and are followed, mortality on the hottest days has fallen measurably. Where they do not exist, and in much of the world they still do not, heatwaves simply arrive as a silent multiplier of existing vulnerability, striking outdoor labourers, older people and those in badly ventilated housing hardest.
Ice and water tell a related story at opposite ends of the hydrological cycle. Antarctic sea ice reached its second-lowest extent on record in 2024, and mountain glaciers from the Andes to the Alps to the Himalaya continued their long retreat, a trend with consequences for downstream water supply that will outlast any single flood or drought. Meanwhile, cloudbursts and extreme rainfall are becoming sharper and more localised, a pattern consistent with a simple piece of physics: warmer air holds more moisture, and when that moisture is released over steep or poorly drained terrain, the result is flash flooding that outpaces infrastructure built for an earlier climate. Small island states and low-lying coastal cities face a parallel threat from rising seas compounding storm surge, a combination that turns a merely bad cyclone into a catastrophic one.
The table below sets a handful of these global indicators side by side, deliberately keeping some in dollars, some in lives and some in temperature, because collapsing them into a single index tends to flatten exactly the differences that matter for deciding where to act first.
| Global indicator | 2024 figure |
|---|---|
| Warmest year on record | 2024, at 1.55°C above the pre-industrial average |
| Extreme weather events recorded worldwide | 605, including 148 classed as unprecedented |
| People displaced by extreme weather | 824,500 — the highest total in 16 years |
| Global economic losses from natural catastrophes | US$ 320 billion (up from US$ 268 billion in 2023); only US$ 140 billion insured |
| Countries with functioning early warning systems | 108 in 2024, up from 52 in 2015; global target is universal coverage by 2027 |
| Antarctic sea ice extent | Second-lowest on record |
Table 1. Global extreme weather indicators, 2024. Sources: World Meteorological Organisation, State of the Global Climate 2024; Munich Re, NatCatSERVICE.
What ties these hazards together is not simply their frequency but a persistent gap between the pace of risk and the pace of institutional response. That gap is narrowing in places. The number of countries with functioning early warning systems has risen from 52 in 2015 to 108 in 2024, part of the United Nations' Early Warnings for All initiative, which aims for universal coverage by the end of 2027. Early warning systems are not a luxury item: WMO analysis suggests they return roughly ten dollars in avoided damage for every dollar spent, yet half of the world's countries still lack an adequate multi-hazard system, and coverage in small island states and the least-developed countries remains the thinnest of all.
The figure below places 2024 alongside the previous year using the reinsurance industry's own loss data. The gap between total and insured losses is the more telling number: most of what extreme weather destroys worldwide is still absorbed by uninsured households, farms and public budgets rather than by markets built to spread the risk.
Figure 1. Global economic losses from natural catastrophes, total versus insured, 2023 versus 2024. Source: Munich Re, NatCatSERVICE 2024 annual review.
Three shifts deserve more attention than they currently receive from national governments and international donors alike. The first is investment in nature-based defences: restored wetlands, mangroves and floodplains absorb flood peaks more effectively than concrete alone, at a fraction of the capital cost, while also supporting the fisheries and agriculture that coastal and river communities depend on. The second is hyperlocal early warning, since a national heatwave bulletin means little to a construction worker on a specific site without shade or water; forecasting needs to reach municipal wards and village councils, not stop at national weather services. The third is a deliberate incorporation of indigenous and traditional knowledge into formal systems: Pacific Islander navigators reading swell patterns, Sahelian herders tracking rainfall migration, and Andean farmers reading frost signs in the sky have generations of locally calibrated observation that complements, rather than competes with, satellite data.
None of this is free, and no honest column pretends otherwise. Climate-resilient infrastructure costs more upfront than infrastructure built to old specifications, and retrofitting a coastal city is slower and more disruptive than designing it correctly from the outset. A heat action plan that works in one city will not transfer unchanged to a different climate, income level or governance structure; each place needs its own diagnosis of who is exposed, to what, and when. What the world cannot afford is the alternative already on display in 2024: waiting for the next unprecedented event to justify the next round of spending, while the underlying trend keeps moving in one direction and the bill keeps growing.
The question this decade poses is not whether extreme weather will keep intensifying, since the physics on that point is settled. It is whether the institutions meant to manage the consequences keep pace, or keep falling further behind. On the 2024 numbers, they are still falling behind, but by a margin that better-targeted, better-funded and more locally grounded action could still close.
Sources
World Meteorological Organization, “Early Warnings for All”, initiative overview
Article Topics
extreme weather events climate adaptation disaster risk reduction early-warning systems climate finance global resilience
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the organisation.
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