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Leaders and ministers of eight nations that span the Amazon rainforest are meeting in Brazil to chart a course for the protection of a region that’s crucial to countering climate change. As they meet in Belem, Indigenous people from the region are maintaining a constant presence to remind them of the stakes.
Evidence of that climate change has been scattered across the globe this year, ranging from crushing heat to costly droughts and devastating flooding. On Wednesday, the reinsurer Swiss Re Group put a partial price tag on that, reporting that severe thunderstorms in the U.S. in the first half of the year led to $34 billion in insured losses.
That’s an unprecedented level of financial damage in such a short time, Swiss Re said. The toll included 10 U.S. storms with damage of $1 billion or more, with Texas the state most severely affected. The U.S. storm damage was nearly 70% of $50 billion in global catastrophic damages so far this year which also included earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.
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