Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

In recent years Atlantic Canada has seen many examples of extreme weather and climate events such as floods, hurricanes, thunderstorms, severe rainfalls and snowstorms, storm surges, heat waves and others. These extreme weather events resulted in significant economic damage which has affected lives of people in the region as well as public finances. The existing literature on extreme weather and climate events claims that frequency and magnitude of these events are going to increase in the future due to changing climate. In this regard, this study address two issues - establishing the link between climate change and extreme weather events on the one hand and evaluating economic damage from those events on the other – by means of a rigorous statistical analysis. The relationship between frequencies of floods, hurricanes, heavy rainfalls and snowstorms and climate variables such as temperature, precipitation and sea level is established on the basis of log-log complimentary model and Poisson regressions. Other specific factors associated with each extreme weather event are used as control variables. Our estimation on the basis of these statistical methods has shown a strong and statistically significant positive correlation between frequencies of the above mentioned extreme weather events and climate variables which proves the link between frequencies of these events and climate change in Atlantic Canada. These results are the basis for estimation of the so-called damage functions associated with extreme weather events in Atlantic Canada that will provide economic justification for the investments into preventive and mitigation measures in the region.