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Climate change
Opinion
David Dodwell
David Dodwell

Outside In | The cost of living in a world getting rapidly hotter? It’s a killer

  • Heat is a silent killer and the true cost of rising temperatures, from losses in work productivity and crop yields, climate migration and weather disruptions, is still being reckoned

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People watch wildfires close to the village of Vati on the Greek island of Rhodes on July 25. Some 30,000 people fled over the weekend in the country’s largest-ever wildfire evacuation. Photo: AFP
David Dodwell

Heat is killing us – and the economy too. This was the headline on an Atlantic Council report, which writes: “Heat is killing and injuring many Americans while striking the country at the core of its economic machine, with serious consequences for workers, businesses and local governments.”

Heat, it declared, was “the theme of this American summer”. But “this” was 2021 and we can be forgiven a sense of déjà vu as the summer of 2023 swelters on. In a groundbreaking study of the economic losses from the searing heat that used to happen once in 100 years but now seems to traumatise us every summer, the council estimated that losses in the United States would amount to US$100 billion a year, and rise fivefold by 2050.
Yet because “heat often destroys quietly”, the impact of a hotter world is overlooked. The report added: “Though heat kills more Americans annually than any other natural disaster, it does so without the drama of a hurricane ripping the roof off a house.”
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Two years later, in what threatens to be the most torrid summer recorded, the harm of extreme heat is arguably being reported more noisily. But the impact is so comprehensive and globally dispersed that we still have only the most fragmented picture of the Armageddon that global warming is unleashing.

Wildfires and floods, typhoons and droughts provide heart-wrenching images of destruction, with communities destroyed and crops decimated – but the economic costs are rarely computed. With wildfires raging on Greek islands, in Algeria, Italy and Spain, the focus is inevitably on human drama.
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When we learn that Canada still had more than 650 wildfires out of control on July 24, with over 11 million hectares destroyed so far this year, the economic ramifications are staggering.

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