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More than four-in-10 U.S. residents live in a county that was struck by climate-related extreme weather last year, while more than 80% experienced a heat wave, according to a new report.

The Washington Post conducted , which shows that ‘in the country that has generated more greenhouse gases than any other nation in history, global warming is expanding its reach and exacting an escalating toll.”

The report cites National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data showing the cost of the destruction was more than $104 billion – and that’s before officials calculate the final toll of wildfires, drought and heat waves in the Western U.S.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency declared eight of climate-related emergencies statewide, the most since 1998, encompassing 135 million people overall, according to the Washington Post report.

The report calls out numerous disasters last year, including the most recent Dec. 30 Marshall Fire in Colorado that destroyed more than 1,000 homes, to become the most destructive blaze in state history. Catastrophe modeler Karen Clark & Co. this week said estimated insured losses from the wildfire would amount to around $1 billion.

“Fires like that are not supposed to happen in densely populated suburbs,” the report states. “They’re not supposed to ignite in December, long after the first snows of the winter have usually fallen.”

Taiwan Fund

Taiwan’s largest pension fund is set to issue what may be considered Asia’s first climate change-focused stock mandate, worth $2.3 billion, amid pressure for the financial sector to support green investing, Reuters reported.

Liu Liju, deputy director general at the fund, told Reuters that the open-tender bidding process for asset managers seeking to be involved in the Bureau of Labor Funds mandate will commence in the first quarter of the year.

“Climate change is an ongoing process no-one can ignore,” Liu said. “We have seen many making commitments by words, we are putting money where our mouth is.”

The fund has Taiwanese $5.5 trillion ($199 billion) worth of assets, with roughly half of it invested in offshore markets, and currently global asset managers including BlackRock Inc, Fidelity Investments, and PIMCO manage the assets, according to the article.

Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund in 2018 allocated 1.2 trillion yen ($10 billion) to companies covered by two S&P carbon-efficient indices, but it has yet to hire external managers for a climate mandate to be run on its behalf.

Selected managers of the Taiwanese pension fund mandate are expected to deliver an additional 0.5% annualized return on top of the performance of a climate index, and the pension fund will likely refer to MSCI ACWI Climate Paris Aligned Index for benchmarking purposes, according to the Reuters article.

Hottest Year

The year ended as the fifth hottest in records maintained by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service that go back to 1979.

That’s according to a Bloomberg article on Insurance Journal this week.

Copernicus is expected to release its full results later this month, while global temperature data is expected to be coming later on from NASA, NOAA, the U.K. Met Office, and Berkeley Earth.

That findings in the Bloomberg story come from publicly available data analyzed by Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkley Earth, said it’s likely that other data sources will rank 2021 somewhere between the fifth- and seventh-hottest years on record.

“Last year did set the highest-ever June-to-August average land temperature,” the Bloomberg article states. “But a La Niña event, which is an occasional cooling pattern in the Pacific Ocean, arrived in October and caused temperatures to dip. That pattern makes winter milder in the southern U.S. and has been blamed for contributing to flooding in Indonesia and Australia.”

Hausfather’s analysis of the Copernicus data notes that it was enough to push 2021’s average temperature down closer to 2018 and 2015.

“The last seven years are the hottest on record and 21 of the 22 hottest years have come since the year 2000, according to the Copernicus data,” the article states.

Time

Rich countries should take more responsibility for climate change, writes the person who heads the Republic of Palau.

Surangel S. Whipps Jr. is president of the archipelago of over 500 islands in the Western Pacific Ocean.

In a recent article Whipps penned in Time he writes that Palau “has been ravaged by the climate crisis,” including two major typhoons that resulted in a loss of more than half of the nation’s gross domestic product.

“Our lives have been engulfed by sea-level rise for two decades. King tides habitually flow into our homes,” he writes. “Mudslides are common along the only road to our hospital and main business center during increasingly frequent and intense storms. It is only a matter of time before a typhoon floods the corridors of our only hospital, wreaking havoc on our already strained public-health system. These once seasonal occurrences now exacerbate our existing health, environment and economic crises.”

He argues that Pacific small-island nation-states like his are responsible for only 0.03% of global emissions – combined – while powerful economies continue to discharge emissions and leave unfulfilled promises and pledges to fund losses and damages.

Palau recently joined the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law “to seek justice that advances the basic principle that the polluter must pay.”

“We hope that our case will help determine the obligations of countries under international law and hold polluters accountable,” he writes.

Past columns:

• Meteorological Society Details Extreme Weather Made More Likely by Climate Change
• Climate Report: ‘Low- to No-Snow’ Will Worsen Water Shortages in U.S. West
• NAIC Report Outlines Ways to Address Climate-Related Risks
• Reports from U.S.-based Group Will Examine Impacts of Climate Change on Terrorism
• California Releases Climate Draft Plan, Axis Accelerates Retreat from Coal

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