Exploratory Data Analysis of Climate Change and its Relation to the Occurrence and?Economic Impact of Natural Hazards

By Paraskevas Tsangaratos

Part of our published paper (Exploratory Data Analysis of Climate Change and its Relation to the Occurrence and Economic Impact of Natural Hazards) at the 16th International Congress of the Geological Society of Greece held in Patras, Greece.?

According to the Emergency Event Database (CRED, 2022) report for 2021 there were reported 432 disastrous events related to natural hazards worldwide which is considerably higher than the average of 357 annual catastrophic events for 2001-2020 (fig.1).

The objective of the study was to analyze global temperature, which served as a climate change indicator and its relation to the occurrence of natural disasters. The graph shows the variation of natural catastrophic events recorded on a global scale in relation to the temperature anomaly. A clear and particularly strong increase in the number of natural disasters was noted with the analogous increase in temperature anomaly (fig.2). In climate science, temperature anomaly represents temperature pattern accurately than absolute temperature. It is a measure of the departure from baseline temperature. Basically, it indicates how much warmer or cooler it is than the baseline. The baseline used here is the average temperature over the 30-year period 1951-1980 (base period used by NASA).

The data used in this study concern global temperatures for the period 1850-2015 which were extracted from the Berkeley Earth database (https://berkeleyearth.org/data). Moreover, natural hazards data was taken for the same period 1900-2018 from Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT (2019)) which are available via https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters.?

The key insights uncovered by the analysis are:

• There has been a steady warming of Earth since 1920 and forward.
• A strong positive correlation between global temperature rises and global occurrences of natural disasters has been observed.
• From 1940 when Earth becomes warmer than the normal, natural disasters also start rising globally.
• By the end of 2015, the Earth was 0.76 degree Celsius warmer than the normal. The result above confirms the scientific consensus that the Earth is warming.

Reference

Chrysafi, A., Tsangaratos, P., 2022. Exploratory Data Analysis of Climate Change and its Relation to the Occurrence and Economic Impact of Natural Hazards. 16th International Congress of the Geological Society of Greece held in Patras, Greece.

CRED, 2022. Disaster in numbers. Brussels, https://cred.be/sites/default/files/2021_EMDAT_report.pdf