TY  - GEN
A1  - Geiger, Tobias
A1  - Frieler, Katja
A1  - Levermann, Anders
T1  - Reply to Comment on: High-income does not protect against hurricane losses (Environmental research letters. -  12 (2017))
T2  - Environmental research letters
N2  - Recently a multitude of empirically derived damage models have been applied to project future tropical cyclone (TC) losses for the United States. In their study (Geiger et al 2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 084012) compared two approaches that differ in the scaling of losses with socio-economic drivers: the commonly-used approach resulting in a sub-linear scaling of historical TC losses with a nation's affected gross domestic product (GDP), and the disentangled approach that shows a sub-linear increase with affected population and a super-linear scaling of relative losses with per capita income. Statistics cannot determine which approach is preferable but since process understanding demands that there is a dependence of the loss on both GDP per capita and population, an approach that accounts for both separately is preferable to one which assumes a specific relation between the two dependencies. In the accompanying comment, Rybski et al argued that there is no rigorous evidence to reach the conclusion that high-income does not protect against hurricane losses. Here we affirm that our conclusion is drawn correctly and reply to further remarks raised in the comment, highlighting the adequateness of our approach but also the potential for future extension of our research.
KW  - climate change
KW  - tropical cyclones
KW  - damage
KW  - meteorological extremes
KW  - vulnerability
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa88d6
SN  - 1748-9326
VL  - 12
PB  - IOP Publ. Ltd.
CY  - Bristol
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Geiger, Tobias
A1  - Frieler, Katja
A1  - Levermann, Anders
T1  - High-income does not protect against hurricane losses
JF  - Environmental research letters
N2  - Damage due to tropical cyclones accounts for more than 50% of all meteorologically-induced economic losses worldwide. Their nominal impact is projected to increase substantially as the exposed population grows, per capita income increases, and anthropogenic climate change manifests. So far, historical losses due to tropical cyclones have been found to increase less than linearly with a nation's affected gross domestic product (GDP). Here we show that for the United States this scaling is caused by a sub-linear increase with affected population while relative losses scale super-linearly with per capita income. The finding is robust across a multitude of empirically derived damage models that link the storm's wind speed, exposed population, and per capita GDP to reported losses. The separation of both socio-economic predictors strongly affects the projection of potential future hurricane losses. Separating the effects of growth in population and per-capita income, per hurricane losses with respect to national GDP are projected to triple by the end of the century under unmitigated climate change, while they are estimated to decrease slightly without the separation.
KW  - climate change
KW  - tropical cyclones
KW  - damage
KW  - meteorological extremes
KW  - vulnerability
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084012
SN  - 1748-9326
VL  - 11
PB  - IOP Publ. Ltd.
CY  - Bristol
ER  -