It’s that time of year again, when Christian Aid seeks to spoil our Christmas cheer by publishing its annual report, telling us that it’s all going to hell in a handcart, and the reason is climate change. Indeed, the report is headed (as it always is) “Counting the Cost. A year of climate breakdown”. When that’s always the title of your annual report, I suppose it’s going to be a case of seek and ye shall find. It wouldn’t do to have little to report, now would it? As usual, the Guardian is happy to publicise the doom and gloom. Its article about the 2025 report headlines with “Cyclones, floods and wildfires among 2025’s costliest climate-related disasters” and offers a subsidiary headline to the effect that “Christian Aid annual report’s top 10 disasters amounted to more than $120bn in insured losses”. The article refers, inter alia, to floods in China, then tells us that:

Devastating events such as these are often grouped together as “natural disasters”, as if they were simply the consequences of normal weather variation. But this is a misperception, according to the report’s authors.

Instead “damaging events were increasing in frequency and intensity owing to the human-made climate crisis.” Yet the reality is that this year’s floods in China, tragic though they were, with a high toll both financially and in respect of human lives, don’t come close to measuring up to some of China’s historic floods.

The report itself is unashamedly alarmist about the climate and is aimed at urging a transition from fossil fuels to renewables. It repeats (in the Foreword) the now common (but highly dubious) claim that “Renewables remain the cheapest form of new electricity“, yet also insists that “Rich countries must do far more to finance the clean energy transition”. One wonders why urgent financing from the developed world is so necessary in respect of something which is supposedly so much cheaper than the alternative? The whole report is massively political, nakedly so. Read it for yourself and see. The key point is that it claims that the top ten “climate” disasters cost more than $120bn. Despite telling us that “people in the global South are already experiencing permanent loss and damage from a crisis they did little to cause” it’s worth reflecting that half of that $120bn is attributed to a single disaster, which occurred, not in the global South, but in the USA – the Palisades and Eaton fires of last January.

If things are getting worse, as alleged, than it’s strange that the 2024 report (which can be accessed from here) shows the worst ten “climate” disasters causing close to $230bn of damage. And again the bulk of that cost related to the USA. This isn’t particularly surprising, given that wealthy nations are likely to incur the biggest financial losses whenever a disaster occurs.

The 2023 report did things differently, so direct comparisons are difficult to make. Instead, it chose to focus on per capita costs, possibly because they were struggling to make the total costs add up to a sufficiently scary figure. Instead we were told that the worst disaster (the Hawaii wildfire) cost $4,161 per capita. This is much more than the second most expensive (per capita), the Guam storm, which came in at $1,455 per person. Yet again, despite claims that the blameless global South is bearing the brunt of the climate crisis (sic), we find that the USA tops the league of costs resulting from disasters which are linked by Christian Aid to climate change.

2022 saw the traditional methodology of identifying costs associated with each disaster. Again it was worse than 2025, with the top ten events adding up to around $170bn. Again, the USA suffered the greatest costs, with $100bn alone attributed to Hurrican Ian, which caused damage in Cuba and the USA (the costs aren’t identified separately, but it seems reasonable to assume that the USA will have suffered significantly higher costs than Cuba). The report can be downloaded from here.

The 2021 report can be downloaded from here. Again the top ten incidents added up to close to $170bn. Again, the USA bore the brunt of these costs, with $65bn attributed to Hurricane Ida and $23bn to the Texas winter storm. Europe fared badly too, with $43bn attributed to European floods and $5.6bn to a cold wave in France. Canada also got in on the act, with $7.5bn of damage said to have been caused by floods in British Columbia. It can readily be seen that costs in the global South again formed a tiny proportion of the total costs attributed by Christian Aid to damage which it says was caused by climate change. The report also includes the following:

Since the 1970s, the lake [Chad] has shrunk about 90% of its original size after repetitive droughts. In 1963 the lake covered 26,000 square kilometres. Now, it is less than 1,500 square kilometres.

A recent analysis showed that temperatures have increased and precipitation has decreased in different regions of Lake Chad between 1951 and 2015. These trends are expected to continue in the future.

Perhaps someone at Christian Aid should read Jit’s take on this. They might learn something.

The 2020 report again adds the costs of the top ten events up to more than it managed this year – in that case they came to about $145bn. Once more, the USA did rather badly – hurricanes said to have cost $41bn affected it, Central America and the Caribbean. Chinese floods are said to have cost $32bn, but in view of its very long history of extremely damaging floods, it seems a bit incautious to blame climate change for them, and in any event, given China’s massive greenhouse gas emissions, they hardly qualify as part of the “blameless” global South. Quite what east African locust swarms have to do with climate change isn’t clear, but $8.5bn of costs is marked down against this event.

Conclusion

Christian Aid’s reports are propaganda, pure and simple. The most inappropriate disasters are attributed to climate change. The costs identified aren’t demonstrating an increasing trend (despite the world getting richer and its population of humans increasing). The USA, not the global South, is bearing the brunt of the costs identified. If Christian Aid wishes to persuade the developed world to help finance the developing world, perhaps it should revert to traditional notions of Christian charity, rather than seeking to make an extremely dubious case out of climate change and blame attribution. Not least because, as COP30 has just demonstrated, nobody is listening.