Climate change adds a surcharge to the cost of hurricane damage

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This week:

• Climate change adds a surcharge to the cost of hurricanes
• Big Picture: Biodiversity Jenga
• Do bike lanes really cause more traffic congestion?

Climate change adds a surcharge to the cost of hurricane damage

When researchers with World Weather Attribution studied Hurricane Milton, they found climate change made Milton 20 to 30 per cent more intense, effectively pumping it up from a Category 2 to a Category 3 hurricane.

That's how rapid attribution science puts a number to how much humanity's burning of fossil fuels contributes to the strength of an extreme weather event.

But what if you heard it this way:

Climate change is responsible for nearly half the economic damage from Hurricane Milton. Considering insured losses from Milton are estimated at $30 billion to 50 billion, it's no small number.

That's how Ralf Toumi, director of the Grantham Institute, a research organization at Imperial College London, wants to shift the conversation after sensing fatigue with other analyses of extreme weather.

"I felt there was really a need to convert it into maybe a more meaningful number to people, which was dollars, frankly," Toumi told CBC News.

To make it make sense, his analysis of Milton (and Helene before it) included data on the assets in the path of the storm, like homes, businesses and infrastructure, and worked in the relationship between damage and wind speed. Hurricane categories are differentiated by wind speed, and even a modest increase can result in far more damage.

"At certain wind speeds, nothing happens," Toumi explained. "But at other wind speeds, things suddenly break. Once you start breaking those sorts of thresholds, the damage accumulates very, very quickly."

For Anabela Bonada, with the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo, it's a good number to have.

"I think it's a great approach because one of the questions that we first get asked is: 'So how much did this cost?' And everybody wants that number," Bonada explained, adding that such a rapid economic analysis would remind people of the cost of climate change.

But experts, including Toumi, warn this is a simplified model. Bonada also says it's likely a conservative estimate, given that insured losses are just a part of the picture.

"We've found that it's about $3 to $4 more, for every dollar of insured loss," Bonada told CBC News. "So that means that the rest of us, taxpayers, are paying for the rest of the damage that insurance doesn't cover."

Toumi says the economic analysis also doesn't account for flooding damage outside of the Hurricane's path, which killed and devastated communities in the Carolinas and Georgia.

Gordon McBean, professor emeritus at Western University and with the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, adds that it can't account for the prolonged human cost, even years later.

"We can put numbers on it, as they've done in this report, but there is also the whole social, psychological, traumatic impacts of these kinds of events," McBean explained, pointing to research of Hurricane Katrina survivors, who showed higher rates of psychological distress and post-traumatic stress.

But keeping the dollar amount in people's minds is still important.

"It's only getting costlier," Bonada says, pointing to the $7.7 billion in insured losses from flooding, fires and hailstorms in Canada this year.

"That's the highest we've had in the last 20 years, when the graph starts. And it's just going up exponentially."

Anand Ram

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Reader feedback

Last week, Inayat Singh wrote about a study that found being near an EV charger is good for business. Jim Holtom says the location of EV charging affects where he spends his money: "I own an EV and have a family cottage near Lindsay, Ont. There are no convenient high speed chargers anywhere in Lindsay close to restaurants and shopping, but there is a 50 kW Flo charger in downtown Bobcaygeon beside the Trent Waterway. Consequently, we often drive to Bobcaygeon and go shopping or eat dinner while the car charges. There is no disputing that we spend a lot of time and money in Bobcaygeon exclusively owing to the charger."

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The Big Picture: Biodiversity Jenga

Conservationists sometimes liken biodiversity to a game of Jenga, where removing one species may not make the tower fall, but weakens it and makes it vulnerable to other disturbances. Canadian artist Benjamin Von Wong put this analogy on display at the COP16 UN Biodiversity Summit currently underway in Cali, Colombia. He has built a six-metre-tall stack of hollow blocks, containing dioramas of different ecosystems, from tropical jungles to kelp forests, inhabited by tiny animal sculptures crafted by 200 young students. You can get a closer look on Von Wong's Instagram.

The sculpture is a reminder of what's at stake at the summit, which will check in on the progress of nearly 200 countries that signed a landmark biodiversity agreement two years ago in Montreal. In it, they committed to stop and reverse the loss of nature by the end of the decade and raise $700 billion a year to achieve that goal.

That's good news because, as Von Wong told CBC's As It Happens, biodiversity does differ from Jenga in a crucial way: "The game of biodiversity is one in which we can put blocks back in."

Read more about where things stand

Emily Chung

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• While some universities have pulled investments out of fossil fuels, the University of Toronto's environment school has taken a much bigger step: This week it announced it will stop taking funds from fossil fuel companies for research, sponsorships, scholarships or infrastructure and halt collaborations with industry on events.

• The federal government has cut emissions from its buildings and cars by 39.8 per cent over 17 years. That means the largest owner of physical assets in the country is very close to its goal of cutting emission by 40 per cent by 2025, The Narwhal reports.

• EVs are unaffordable to owners of bus and truck fleets partly because they can't get the financing and leasing they need to buy them. One of the problems is that finance companies don't know how much their used batteries are worth.

• The fate of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the oil and gas beneath it could be decided with the U.S. election.

• Some people are getting inked for the sake of the planet. The permanent designs remind them to keep pushing for a better future and to celebrate their climate wins.

Do bike lanes really cause more congestion?

This week, the Ontario government introduced legislation that would require municipalities to get provincial approval to install any bike lanes that would remove a lane of vehicle traffic, which resulted in a firestorm of debate and protests.

While advocates look at dedicated bicycle lanes as encouraging more people to travel by bike resulting in less traffic congestion, safer commutes for cyclists and reduced greenhouse gas emissions some motorists blame them for causing more congestion.

But research shows that dedicated bicycle lanes are not behind perceived traffic congestion and can have many benefits.

One would think that building more roads with more lanes for cars would reduce congestion, but research shows that's not the case, thanks to something called induced demand. The more traffic lanes that are put in, the more it appeals to people who may not otherwise have chosen to drive, thereby putting more cars on the roads and increasing congestion.

"Within a year or two, or perhaps three, traffic is as bad or worse than it was before the lanes were added in the first place," said David Beitel, data services lead at Eco-Counter, a Montreal company that collects and analyzes pedestrian and bicycle traffic data.

Conversely, if you put in more dedicated bike lanes, people tend to feel safer and demand for use increases, said Shoshanna Saxe, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto's department of civil and mineral engineering and Canada Research Chair in sustainable infrastructure.

"As soon as you build a bike lane, within a year, two years, the latent demand shows up," she said.

Bike Share Toronto statistics show that ridership on its network of shared bikes has increased dramatically since 2015, when 665,000 bike trips were made annually. In 2023, that shot up to 5.7 million trips.

In 2016, the European Commission's CIVITAS program published a study examining traffic congestion that looked at several cities around the world.

In New York City in 2010, before bike lanes were installed on a major midtown thoroughfare, it took the average car 4.5 minutes to travel from 96th Street to 77th Street. After, it took just three minutes. One of the reasons cited for the change was the installation of a left-turn lane, which not only kept cyclists moving but also stopped cars from holding up traffic.

In Copenhagen, which introduced its first "green wave" to encourage cycling in 2007, the city reported that "the large number of bicycles, for example, makes it easier for necessary basic motor transport such as tradesmen, goods transport and buses to get through more easily."

Other case studies found either no impacts on traffic, or minimal delays anywhere from a few seconds to just over a minute.

Paris saw a 54 per cent increase in bike use from 2018 to 2019. And for the first time, car use decreased by five per cent between 2010 and 2018.

"They went all-in on bike lanes 30 per cent of trips now are made by bike in Paris," Saxe said.

In some Canadian cities, particularly Montreal, Vancouver and Edmonton, bike lanes are widely used. Montreal has a whopping 1,065 kilometres of bike lanes, and Edmonton has more than 800 kilometres, with more planned.

So why do people tend to blame bike lanes for traffic?

Beitel said, "I think we see bike lanes, we see more people riding, we want to associate this with the causes of traffic."

Instead, Beitel said, it's more about our cities growing. He noted StatsCan reported 35.7 million registered vehicles in 2019, up from 23.6 million in 2000. "That's a 50 per cent increase in 20 years."

In Toronto, the city compared traffic on a stretch of Bloor West from November 2022 to March 2023, before and after bike lanes were added. It found average increases in motor vehicle times of 1.5 to 4.4 minutes.

But Saxe said those findings are misleading, since there were still COVID-19 shutdowns in 2022.

"Travel times have gone up all over the city, not because of bike lanes, but because we've had a recovery from the pandemic. We go out more, we go to work more,"

According to a 2019 report looking at the impacts of bike lanes on a different stretch of Bloor Street, local businesses reported getting more customers since the lanes were installed.

"Building bike lanes is about giving people another choice," Saxe said.

Nicole Mortillaro

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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag| Logo design: Skdt McNalty