Tufts: The Humanitarian Costs of Climate Change

By Mackinnon Webster, Justin Ginnetti, Peter Walker, Daniel Coppard, and Randolph Kent

A new research report which examines the projected increases in humanitarian response costs resulting from climate change.

The research uses a number of different models to project the likely increases in humanitarian spending as a result of climate change, twenty years into the future. It uses trends projecting from past spending data to assess the likely increase in spending resulting from climate change.

The findings indicate that climate change will have a significant impact on humanitarian costs and the increase could range from a 32% increase, taking into account only changes in frequency of disasters, to upwards of a 1600% increase when other criteria, such as intensity, are also taken into account. The report also highlights the tremendous limitations in the present global databases on humanitarian spending and the difficulties in using these to project future trends.

View or download the report at the Tufts website.