Obama Says Fighting Climate Change Is Good For Business—Except For The Oil Business

Quartz - Ana Campoy

Advancing wind—and solar. (Reuters/Larry Downing)

US president Barack Obama has a message for climate-change naysayers: Don’t look at fighting global warming as saving the world, but as a promising business.
During his eighth and last State of the Union address, Obama called upon the nation to not “pass up the chance for American businesses to produce and sell the energy of the future.”
Investments in alternative energy such as wind and solar have already slashed energy costs and utility bills, and boosted wages for energy workers, he said during the speech.
More needs to be spent on alternative energy, he went on, and less on subsidizing fossil fuels. As part of that goal, Obama vowed to change how oil and coal are managed “so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.” That would inject money into local economies and help the nation build a “21st-century transportation system,” he said.
To some observers, that sounded remarkably close to a carbon tax, something academics and environmentalists have long pushed as a mechanism to curb global-warming emissions.
Whatever the president has in mind, the oil industry doesn’t appear to like the sound of it. API, the US’s main oil-industry trade group, responded to the speech with a statement saying Obama should avoid “bombarding our economy with duplicative, job-crushing new regulations.”
“The goals of environmental progress and energy production are not mutually exclusive,” API’s CEO, Jack Gerard, said in the statement. “Our nation’s new status as the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas is saving American families and businesses billions in energy costs.”

Baby Fish May Get Lost In Silent Oceans As Carbon Dioxide Rises

ABC Science - Rachel Sullivan

Rising CO2 in oceans may make it harder for some species of juvenile fish to navigate using sound. (Getty Images)

Key points: Study shows area around ocean vent releasing CO2 that mimics projected climate change models is quieter Fish larvae exposed to same CO2 conditions in laboratory did not respond to sound In future, marine animals may need to rely on other cues such as smell and vision to navigate

Future oceans will be much quieter places, making it harder for young marine animals that navigate using sound to find their way back home, new research has found.
Under acidification levels predicted for the end of the century, fish larvae will cease to respond to the auditory cues that present-day species use to orient themselves, scientists reported in the journal Biology Letters.
While ocean acidification is known to affect a wide range of marine organisms and processes such as smell, until now its effect on marine soundscapes and impact on the larvae of marine animals was unknown.
The ocean is filled with sounds that carry information about location and habitat quality, study co-author Sir Ivan Nagelkerken said.
"Along with chemical and other cues, because of sound's ability to travel long distances underwater, it is used as a navigational beacon by marine animals, particularly larvae," Dr Nagelkerken said.
"More than 95 per cent of marine animals have a dispersive larval stage, where larvae drift with the currents for anywhere from a few days to a year, before returning to settle in their adult habitat near where they were spawned."
To understand how acidification affects these marine animals, the team led by PhD student Tullio Rossi travelled to a naturally occurring carbon dioxide vent near White Island in New Zealand, where ocean acidification levels are similar to those predicted for the end of the century under business-as-usual conditions.
"This natural laboratory gave us a peek into the future," Dr Nagelkerken said.

[Animals] that rely on sound as an orientation cue will be heavily impacted, limiting their ability to survive and contribute to the population. Associate Professor Sir Ivan Nagelkerken 

"We recorded the soundscape around the vent, then compared the loudness and composition of sounds with control sites a few hundred metres away."
The area around the vent was much quieter, the team found.
"There could be a number of explanations for the decrease in sound," Dr Nagelkerken said.
"For example, as acidification increases, kelp forests may be replaced by turf algae. This results in changing abundance of the animals that produce sounds, such as snapping shrimp whose ubiquitous crackle forms the backdrop to present-day ocean soundscapes."

Higher CO2 changes fish larvae behaviour
To understand how acidification affects marine animals' auditory preferences, the researchers studied the impact of increased carbon dioxide levels on settlement-stage mulloway (Argyrosomus japonicas), a common temperate fish species.
They found that the 25- to 28-day-old larvae that had been exposed to higher carbon dioxide concentrations deliberately avoided present-day acoustic habitat cues recorded near White Island, while fish reared in present-day carbon dioxide levels responded positively.
Neither group of fish responded to the "future" soundscape recorded around the vent, despite the hearing of the normal fish being unimpaired.
Ocean acidification is known to increase the size of otoliths — fish ear bones — used for hearing, orientation and balance.
It has been hypothesised that bigger ear bones would increase the hearing range of larval fish, but the hearing in fish reared in future carbon dioxide levels was negatively impacted by ocean acidification, even though they had larger ear bones.
Dr Nagelkerken said the findings suggested that in the future, affected species would have to use other, potentially less reliable cues to help them navigate, even though other senses such as vision and smell are also negatively impacted by ocean acidification.
"Finding a home is the key to population sustainability," Dr Nagelkerken said.
"Those that rely on sound as an orientation cue will be heavily impacted, limiting their ability to survive and contribute to the population."

In Pitiful Animal Die-Offs Across The Globe — From Antelopes To Bees To Seabirds — Climate Change May Be Culprit

Washington Post - Sarah Kaplan


Officials in India say more than 80 whales are stranded off the country's southern coast. Officials had rescued and taken at least 36 of the mammals back to sea. (AP)

On the chilly shores of Alaska’s Prince William Sound, tens of thousands of battered bird carcasses are washing up. The birds, all members of a species known as the common murre, appear to have starved to death, wildlife officials said Tuesday. Their black and white bodies lie strewn across the slick rock, or else bob in the shallow waters nearby.

Seven thousand miles away, on a sandy beach in southern India, more than 100 whales were discovered mysteriously stranded on shore this week. Already at least 45 of them are dead, according to the BBC, dried out and overheated by exposure to the sun. More may soon die if they can’t be safely returned to the ocean. The area hasn’t seen this big a stranding in more than 40 years.

These are two isolated incidents, but they’re not unlike others that have been reported in the past year — unexplained die-offs, abnormally large strandings, a worldwide coral bleaching bigger than almost anything else on record. Around the world, animal populations are vulnerable. Huge groups might be killed in a matter of days or weeks. In Kazakhstan in May of last year, more half of the world’s entire population of saiga antelope vanished in less than a month.

Incidents like these are often mysteries to be unraveled, with scientists sorting through various explanations — hunger, habitat loss, disease, disorientation — for the mass deaths. But in a swath of recent cases, many of the die-offs boil down to a common problem: the animals’ environments are changing, and they’re struggling to keep up.

Take the murres dying in Alaska. The seabirds are washing ashore with empty stomachs, Robb Kaler, a seabird biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, told The Washington Post Tuesday. It’s likely that they’re having trouble finding their normal food source — herring and other small fish — because of the region’s recent unusual weather and the abnormally high temperature of water in the sound.

In this Jan. 7, 2016 photo, dead common murres lie washed up on a rocky beach in Whittier, Alaska. Federal scientists in Alaska are looking for the cause of a massive die-off of one of the Arctic’s most abundant seabirds. (Mark Thiessen/AP)

Though large murre die-offs have happened before, this one is on a scale most experts have never seen before, former Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Irons told KTVA-TV.

“Seabird biologists say seabirds are indicators of the health of the ecosystem,” he said. “Now they’re dying, and that is telling us something.”

Bad weather and warm waters are also thought to be the culprit behind the global coral bleaching event that scientists say is going on right now. Though coral looks like simply a colorful rock, it actually comprises many millions of tiny tentacled creatures living in a symbiotic relationship with brightly-colored algae, which give the corals both their color and their nutrients. When water temperatures rise — as they have this year, researchers say, due to a combination of climate change, a powerful El Nino and the Pacific’s weird warm “blob” — the corals become stressed and expel their algae partners, losing their vibrancy and the source of nutrients they need to survive. The ghostly white structures that remains are still alive, but they’re weakened, and the reef will lose much of its biodiversity until the algae can return. If they don’t, the corals are likely to die.

This is a bleaching, and the world’s reefs are in the midst of only the third global bleaching event in recorded history.

Far from any ocean, on the arid shrubgrass steppe of central Kazakhstan, more than 200,000 corpses of the endangered saiga antelope species were discovered scattered across the grassland last May. According to Scientific American, 70 percent of the world’s saigas — strange, Dr. Seuss-looking creatures with spindly legs and a huge protruding snout — were killed in a matter of weeks. And no one knew why.

Dead Saiga antelopes lie In a field in the Zholoba area of the Kostanay region IN Kazakhstan, in this handout photo provided on May 20, 2015 by Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Agriculture. More than half of the world’s total saiga population was killed in a mass die-off last year. (Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Agriculture/Handout via Reuters)

In November, researchers in Uzbekistan presented their best guess: an abnormally wet spring induced by climate change transformed some normally harmless pathogens that ordinarily live in the saigas’ guts. The suddenly lethal pathogens swept through Kazakhstan’s herds. Once sickened, the animals died in a matter of hours.

“This is really not biologically normal,” Richard A. Kock, of the Royal Veterinary College in London, told the New York Times last year. “I’ve worked in wildlife disease all my life, and I thought I’d seen some pretty grim things. But this takes the biscuit.”

Back in the U.S., the Los Angeles Times reported last August that the drought that has plagued western states for four years was causing a major die-off of vital fish populations like salmon, steelhead and the endangered delta smelt. Water levels were too low, and what’s more, water temperatures were too warm for fish and their offspring to survive.

The smelt numbers had diminished to “the last of the last,” UC Davis professor emeritus Peter Moyle, a leading authority on California’s native fish, told the LA Times. “It would be a major extinction event.”

A bumblebee. (David Goulson, Stirling University/AP)

And last July, researchers reported that global warming is working to “crush bumblebees in a kind of climate vice,” according to Nature.

“Bumblebee species across Europe and North America are declining at continental scales,” Jeremy Kerr, a biodiversity researcher at the University of Ottawa in Canada, told the scientific journal. “Our data suggest that climate change plays a leading, or perhaps the leading, role in this trend.”

It’s not only animals that are at risk. Researchers believe that the western drought killed 12 million trees in California’s forests, and estimated 58 million are so dry they’ve reached the brink of death, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. A study released that last month predicted that climate change would cause massive die-offs of the American southwest’s coniferous trees, like junipers and pinon pines, within the next half century.

Not every die-off of the past year can be blamed on climate change. Two “unusual mortality events” involving endangered Guadelupe fur seals — which were being stranded at eight times the normal rate on California’s central coast — and large whales in Alaska — where scientists have found the decomposing carcasses of more than 30 unlucky animals — have been loosely linked to that weird warm “blob” out in the Pacific. And the causes of other incidents — the recent whale stranding in India, for example — remain undetermined. Typically mass stranding6s are linked to toxic algae blooms, disease and trauma, and changes to the animals’ habitat, marine mammal expert Darlene Ketten told Scientific American in 2009.

In many ways, die-offs are an inevitable aspect of life on Earth. The ebb and flow of species’ success is part of the background noise of existence that drives evolution. Populations have risen and declined long before humans existed. They’re likely to continue to do so long after we’re gone.

But a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year suggests that the number of animal die-offs has gotten worse in recent years. And the researchers weren’t talking about small scale problems like the murres deaths or even the saiga die-offs either. They looked at more than 700 mass mortality events in which either 90 percent of the species was wiped out, more than a billion individuals were killed or 700 million tons (nearly 2,000 Empire State Buildings) worth of biomatter was destroyed.

What they found was not heartening. Mass Mortality Events (MMEs) are “rarely placed in a broader context,” the study’s authors reported. But they seem to be happening at an increased rate for birds, marine invertebrates and fish since the 1940s — even when researchers took into account that such events are more likely to be reported now than they were 75 years ago.

These die-offs matter not just because of the inherent value of the creatures involved, the authors said, but because whole ecosystems may depend on that species to survive.

MMEs, they wrote, “can reshape the ecological and evolutionary trajectories of life on Earth.”

Links

• Mysterious mass deaths of Alaskan birds baffles scientists
• Earth is on brink of a sixth mass extinction, scientists say, and it’s humans’ fault

Obama Disses Climate Change Deniers

Huffington Post - Paige Lavender

"You’ll be pretty lonely."

President Barack Obama dissed those who deny the science around climate change during his last State of the Union address.
"Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it," Obama said. "You’ll be pretty lonely, because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it."

ASSOCIATED PRESS 

Obama touched on the topic while speaking on innovation, saying we need to tap into the "spirit of discovery" in order to solve some of "our biggest challenges."
"Sixty years ago, when the Russians beat us into space, we didn’t deny Sputnik was up there," Obama said. "We didn’t argue about the science, or shrink our research and development budget. We built a space program almost overnight, and twelve years later, we were walking on the moon."
Obama also name-checked some famous leaders in American innovation, touting his administration's push to continue making new discoveries.
"That spirit of discovery is in our DNA. We’re Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers and George Washington Carver. We’re Grace Hopper and Katherine Johnson and Sally Ride," Obama said. "We’re every immigrant and entrepreneur from Boston to Austin to Silicon Valley racing to shape a better world. And over the past seven years, we’ve nurtured that spirit."

Link

• Full Text State of the Union Address

Next Stop For Paris Climate Deal: The Courts

Politico - Sara Stefanini

First came the agreement. Now comes the litigation.

A picture taken on December 11, 2015 shows banners with messages related to global warming attached to an Eiffel Tower made of bistro chairs at the venue of the United Nations conference on climate change COP21 in Le Bourget, on the outskirts of Paris, on December 11, 2015. | Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty

Countries backsliding on their pledges made at the Paris climate summit could soon get dragged into court by their own citizens.
The sweeping agreement reached last month does not place any legally binding requirements on nations to meet their emissions reduction targets. But environmentalists see litigation as their enforcement mechanism of choice if governments fall short of the agreement’s goals to curb global warming.
Other than public shaming, it’s the only way to hold nations accountable, legal experts say.
“One is the moral way, where countries tell each other ‘You should do what you promised,’ and the other is through courts,” said Marjan Minnesma, director of the Dutch environmental foundation Urgenda. “I expect, particularly because most governments say a lot but don’t do a lot, there will be more chances for groups to say the government is not doing enough to protect its citizens.”
Urgenda paved the way for the legal strategy when, in June 2015, it became the first in the world to win a civil suit arguing that a government’s — in this case, the Netherlands — climate policy falls short of protecting its citizens.
Similar cases have already cropped up in Belgium and New Zealand, and more could come as countries begin to devise and implement policies aimed at meeting the goals set out in the Paris framework. The legal threat mounts once the deal takes effect in 2020.

Marjan Minnesma, director of environmental group Urgenda. EPA

The Paris agreement, reached after two weeks of marathon negotiations, is the first to set rules for the whole world — 195 countries, plus the European Union. It sets a goal of limiting global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, and eventually 1.5 degrees, by the end of the century, and to create a balance between the carbon dioxide that humans emit and what is naturally absorbed by the second half of the century.
The binding part of the deal requires countries to set emission reduction targets, develop the policies for meeting them, publicly report their progress every five years starting in 2023, and update and enhance their targets after each review. But what the agreement doesn’t dictate is the size of those emissions reductions, or the tactics that countries should take to reach them.
This is where individuals, NGOs and other advocacy groups come in. If they feel that a government policy falls short of the agreement’s goals, they could take it to court.
Urgenda, joined by 900 co-plaintiffs, seized on an agreement governments reached at the United Nations’ 2010 climate change summit in Cancun, which recognized that wealthy developed countries would have to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020, compared to 1990 levels, in order avoid the worst effects of climate change.
The EU’s goal of cutting the bloc’s emissions by 20 percent by 2020, however, meant the Netherlands would only need to make a 17 percent reduction. A district court in The Hague sided with Urgenda and ordered the government to raise its target to 25 percent by 2020. The Dutch government announced it would appeal two months later.
“Our court case is based on civil law saying there is a very high danger, and therefore the government should protect its citizens,” said Minnesma. “It’s not using the climate change treaty directly, only indirectly.”
The Paris agreement further raises the benchmark against which groups and citizens can measure whether a government is doing enough to protect its citizens, by hiking the global goal to a temperature limit of 1.5 degrees, according to legal experts.

‘Highly controversial’
The issue of how climate change policies fit under a government’s duty to protect its people is a new one for courts, said Lucas Bergkamp, a partner at the law firm Hunton & Williams focused on environmental law.
“To the extent that courts perceive climate change as an existential threat, and to the extent they believe the body politic fails to address it, courts may be inclined to rule in the favor of climate activists because otherwise the world will go down the drain — that’s how they might look at it,” he said.
Bergkamp said the Urgenda ruling is “highly controversial” and “legally doubtful” because it oversteps laws on the separation of powers. Still, he added, “it is certainly a risk that has become much greater with the Paris agreement.”
A lawsuit echoing Urgenda’s claims emerged in Belgium last year, when the Klimaazaak (Climate Action) organization demanded that the federal government, as well as Flemish, Walloon and Brussels regional governments, reduce the country’s carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent by 2020. Belgium is on track to miss its EU-mandated goal of a 15 percent reduction by 2020.
Similarly, a law student in New Zealand filed a suit in November claiming that the government had failed to make sure that its goal of reducing emissions by 11 percent by 2030, from 1990, fell in line with research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In the Philippines, meanwhile, groups filed a petition with the country’s Commission on Human Rights in September claiming that 50 “carbon majors,” including ExxonMobil, Chevron and Lukoil, had violated human rights by knowingly contributing to climate change.
Still, some countries have legal systems that make such lawsuits less likely, experts said. In the U.K., cases filed in national courts have to be based on national laws. The U.S. has a political question doctrine that encourages federal courts to show respect for other branches of government.
Views vary on how effectively the Paris agreement can be enforced.
Bergkamp claims it will be difficult because countries do not face the risk of sanctions or penalties for breaching the agreement, as they would under international trade deals. Others argue that by forcing countries to review and report their progress every five years, and raise their targets, the agreement encourages them to act out of fear of being named and shamed.
“If countries breach those hard obligations, then they will pay the price in reputation and political terms,” said Jonathan Church, an environmental lawyer at the activist law firm ClientEarth.
And if calling out laggards fails to incite action against climate change, the international reporting requirements could help to fuel lawsuits by providing data to back up claims.
“The idea that every government will be presenting a lot more information about how their economies operate and the scale of their emissions is quite an important development,” said Kurt Winter, another ClientEarth lawyer.
“It can help with actually coordinating evidence of whether or not governments are complying with targets, and whether a case can be launched.”

Firefighters Calls For Restructuring, Doubling Of Personnel To Combat Climate Change

Huffington Post - Josh Butler

Bushfire at Waroona, WA, on January 9 | Fairfax Media

The Fire Brigade Employees’ Union has called for a radical overhaul of Australian firefighting, including merging rural and metropolitan services and doubling the total number of firefighters, as they fear climate change is making bushfires more dangerous and more frequent.
Only halfway through the summer, Australia has already experienced a horror fire season with several catastrophic blazes, most notably in Western Australia and South Australia. The Australian Climate and Firefighters Alliance claimed that, since October, bushfires have burnt more than 500,000 hectares of land, destroyed 222 homes and 345 other structures, and killed tens of thousands of livestock.
A November report claimed fire seasons had increased in length by 20 per cent between 1978 and 2013, giving less opportunities for firefighters to conduct hazard reduction exercises as well as placing strain on powerful firefighting equipment -- such as firefighting aircraft -- which are shared between countries. Northern and southern hemisphere fire seasons are also beginning to overlap, placing strain on firefighting equipment shared between countries.
Darin Sullivan, president of the FBEU, said fires were becoming more frequent, more dangerous and less predictable due to erratic weather conditions spurred by climate change and called for an urgent overhaul of how Australia fights fire.
"The first thing is restructuring the fire services. We've got duplication of services across country, with rural and urban fire services, and we all basically do the same thing. It’s dual funded, it's a waste of money," Sullivan told The Huffington Post Australia.
"We need to look at single fire services, we've been calling for it for 20 years in NSW and now we’re calling for it nationally. We’ve essentially got competing fire services now competing for the dollar and they need to be restructured. We believe they could be run more efficiently."
Sullivan also called for the number of firefighters in Australia to double -- a recommendation earlier made by The Climate Council's report -- and for more to be done to address climate change.
"We’ll need a doubling of firefighters by the year 2030. I’m calling on governments to have a proper look at funding of fire services, not just voluntary but professional and trained personnel," he said.
"My union and the majority of firefighters are calling for Australia to take some action on climate change, as our workplace is becoming more dangerous."
Lesley Hughes of The Climate Council said climate change was making fighting fires far more difficult and dangerous. She said hotter days saw vegetation dry out and become potent fire fuel, while unpredictable wind changes could whip a fire out of control quickly.
"What we're seeing is longer bushfire seasons declared earlier in the year than usual. It's all pointing the same direction, an ongoing trend of fire danger occurring more often and when it occurs, that it is more catastrophic," Hughes told HuffPost Australia.
"This is not just a one-off. Every year, the probability increases of earlier, longer, more catastrophic fires."
Sullivan, too, said firefighters on the ground had noticed the effects of changing weather patterns.
"Fires are becoming harder to fight. The weather is becoming more erratic. The anecdotal view is they are becoming harder to fight and more intense. We’re also seeing some response from government and fire services, and it's coming from our experiences on the ground," he said.
"Fires are becoming more frequent and less predictable."
He cited the Yarloop, WA, fire as an example of how quickly fires can blaze out of control.
"I wasn't there but I was looking at some of the reporting of that fire, and it appears to me if a community can only get half an hour notice for evacuation, it's more proof of how unpredictable these fires are," Sullivan said.
"You’ve got professional firefighters and services monitoring the fires with state of the art facilities. This evidences how bad things are getting."

Links

• In The Australian Summer, Extreme Weather Is Becoming Normal
• Record Heat To Extend Into 2016, Says Bureau Of Meteorology
• What Scientists Discovered In Greenland Could Be Making Rising Sea Levels Worse
• This Year's El Niño Is On Track To Rival The Worst On Record
• Emergency Services Have To Canoe Through NSW Towns After Crazy Rain And Flooding

UBS Warns Australian Middle Class Will Not Escape Unscathed From Climate Change

Fairfax - Anthony Macdonald

The UBS report found people who lived in cities most exposed to climate change risk already spent more of their household budget on housing compared to the national average in their countries. Irish Environment

Australians are facing depressed crop yields, mental health pressure and property damage from an increase in extreme weather brought about by climate change.
In considering climate change's impact on the world's middle class – which includes about two-thirds of Australians – investment bank UBS has warned that Australia's urbanised society would not go unaffected.
The investment bank said increased incidence of drought and severe storms affected Australia's significant agricultural sector, which might be struggling to keep up with the acceleration of extreme weather.
It also said extreme weather could adversely affect nutrition and infectious diseases, while rising temperatures would be felt by ageing rural populations.
"Ageing populations are very vulnerable to rising temperatures," UBS' Zurich-based head of UBS and Society Caroline Anstey said.
"Once temperatures get above 30 [degrees], it starts to put real pressure on people, especially people who are older and sick."
The UBS report, which includes the study of middle-class populations in 215 cities and 15 countries, found people who lived in cities most exposed to climate change risk already spent more of their household budget on housing compared to the national average in their countries.
The bank termed it "more fear, less fun", with more money on upkeep and other housing-related costs at the expense of luxury goods and entertainment.
Dr Anstey said the world's middle class had the political power and means to get governments to do more about climate change – and businesses were also taking notice.
"My belief is there is an under-appreciation of the impact of climate change on segments beyond the poor. The middle class have tended to be ignored because there was a feeling they would just internalise the cost, pay it," she said.
"The middle class have political weight and mobilising power. And governments tend to listen when the middle class do not want to carry the costs themselves of climate change adaptation."
The report has particular significance for Australia, given the large middle class and urban populations. UBS said more than 75 per cent of Australians lived in urban settings, which was the highest percentage in the world, while two-thirds of Australia's population could be classified as middle class.
Dr Anstey expects emerging middle classes, particularly from south-east Asian countries, to lead the way in tackling climate change, given the under-development of insurance markets.
"Loss aversion is a very strong determinant of behaviour," she said.
"You have things to lose and the middle class does. The middle class will, we believe, begin to exert more political power."
The UBS report found that people in developed markets tended to be under-insured, ignoring risks until after a rare catastrophe occurs. The analysts found that people tended to underestimate a disaster's occurrence or impact or faced budgetary constraints around insurance.
The report comes as natural catastrophes caused 16,200 fatalities and $US32 billion of damage in the first six months of 2015, based on UBS numbers.