The group will call on leaders of the world's richest nations meeting in Scotland next week to slash carbon dioxide emissions, improve coastal defenses and strengthen buildings to dampen the impact of the predicted storms.
"Governments now have a chance to make rational choices for the future, before it is too late."
So who's the group involved? Greenpeace? The Sierra Club? The Suzuki Foundation? Not exactly:
The cost of cleaning up storm damage will balloon unless the world takes urgent action to cut harmful emissions warming the globe, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) said on Wednesday...
Damage costs from the three most expensive types of storms -- hurricanes in the United States, typhoons in Japan and windstorms in Europe -- will rise to $27 billion in an average year by 2080 up from $16 billion today if carbon dioxide emissions double their current rate, ABI's report said.
The ABI holds about 94% of the domestic British insurance market - meaning that it presumably has tons of corporate clients along with individuals, and has a very strong stake in economic growth. In other words, if controlling climate change were really too expensive to be worth doing, the ABI should be the first organization pointing that out.
Instead the insurance industry, which by definition has the best understanding of the risks people face, now says definitively that the risks of not acting on climate change far exceed the risks of acting.
Even the most staunch anti-environmentalist should be willing to listen to that.
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