Future Costs of Climate Change for Humanitarian and Disaster Aid

The economic impact of climate change on the humanitarian and disaster aid sector is escalating, with 2024 funding needs close to USD 50 billion and projections suggesting worsening conditions. The targets of this aid represent the most fragile countries in the world, but the number of people expected to be in need and the funding required to support them are unknown and difficult to assess – posing an information gap. This study will estimate the economic magnitude of climate impact for humanitarian assistance through 2080.

Leveraging machine learning and a modified damage function framework, we aim to model the relationship from top-down global temperature and precipitation variables, socioeconomic and vulnerability factors like GDP (gross domestic product) and HDI (Human Development Index) to bottom-up populations empirically exposed or affected by climate-related hazards, and finally to those requiring external aid to cope.

We apply Gaussian Process Regression (GPR), a learning method suitable for complex non-linear analysis, to explore this relationship for countries under various shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) and representative concentration pathways (RCPs). The unique data comprises the INFORM Risk and Climate Change indices as well as humanitarian datasets from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and INFORM Severity. We hypothesise that the analysis will reveal increases in humanitarian needs driven by intensifying climate impacts and extreme events, with implications for resource allocation and policy priorities in the sector.

This novel solution addresses key gaps in the economic modelling of non-market climate risks and integrated assessments models (IAM), advancing the integration of people-based humanitarian data into climate impact assessments via machine learning. Concretely, it will quantify the human cost of a warming climate in the most vulnerable areas of the world and inform climate resilience financing on its priorities.