Is climate change responsible for increasing weather-related disasters?

There is ongoing debate both between and within climate scientists and the insurance industry as to whether climate change is responsible for increasing weather-related disasters. The argument against climate change being a dominant driver of increasing disaster losses is that more and more people are living in high risk coastal areas and the value of the property at risk is also increasing. Risk Frontiers has undertaken work for the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) that involves updating their widely-cited database of disaster losses to reflect present day conditions. This study involves adjusting for the change in the time value of money, changes in exposure, and changes in personal wealth. The paper will briefly outline a new adjustment methodology as well as present results from the updated database. These new results will be placed within the context of historical building losses over the past century due to the various natural perils using Risk Frontiers databases.