January 23, 2020
It’s 100 seconds to midnight. Nuclear war, cyber threats and climate change are putting the world in more danger than it has been in over at least the last 70-plus years. The hands of the Doomsday Clock are now closer …
January 23, 2020
It took two years for Nigel Allison to build his mud-brick house on a sleepy southeastern tip of Australia, and just hours for it to be gutted by fire. The cherished three-bedroom home built in 1986 was one of several …
January 22, 2020
The past decade broke new records in terms of economic damages and insured losses, according to Aon’s latest catastrophe report. The costs to global economies reached US$2.98 trillion between 2010 and 2019, which was US$1.19 trillion higher than 2000-2009, said …
January 21, 2020
The New South Wales and Victorian state governments will coordinate the clean-up of insured and uninsured residential and commercial properties destroyed in the deadly wildfires. Under the plan, the states will appoint major contractors to do the work, which will …
January 21, 2020
As the financial industry comes under pressure to avoid funding dirty energy, the heads of Citigroup Inc. and Zurich Insurance Group AG said they need their clients to do more work too. “I say to our clients, ‘I don’t want …
January 17, 2020
Japanese companies have contingency plans for the floods that increasingly drench this island nation, but most have done little to fortify facilities, relying instead on insurance and securing alternative supply sources, a Reuters poll found. Japanese have long been conditioned …
January 15, 2020
Severe storms are expected to bring some relief in the coming days from huge bushfires scorching Australia but the heavy downpours could also carry the risk of landslides and water pollution, officials said on Wednesday. Australia is battling its worst …
January 15, 2020
The World Economic Forum is sounding alarm bells on climate change, with environmental risks occupying the group’s top five long-term concerns for the first time on record. Extreme weather events, the failure of climate-change mitigation, major natural disasters, biodiversity loss …
January 14, 2020
Bushfires ravaging Australia have provided a foretaste of the kinds of conditions that could become normal unless the world moves rapidly to curb emissions of the greenhouse gases driving global warming, scientists have warned. Although Australia’s government and parts of …
January 10, 2020
Australia’s bushfire season has months to run and could easily surpass the most costly fire season, 2009’s Black Saturday fires in Victoria, which had a price tag of an estimated A$4.4 billion (US$3 billion), according to Moody’s Analytics, in a …