From colour-blindness to women’s clothing, early warning systems must ensure no one is left behind.
“Climate change is making storms more intense, dangerous, shifting their paths, and putting more and more people within their reach,” according to the recent WorldRiskReport.
Storms cause the greatest economic damage of any extreme natural event, the report finds, with poorer economies hit disproportionately harder than wealthy industrialised nations. They also rank third in terms of fatalities, after earthquakes and extreme hot or cold temperatures.
Is climate change making storms worse?
The annual report, by German NGO alliance Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft and the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV) at Ruhr University Bochum, focused this year on storms as one of the most common and destructive natural hazards worldwide.
“We are seeing a rise in the proportion of the most powerful storms,” says Dr Friederike Otto, climate scientist and co-founder of World Weather Attribution (WWA), who is interviewed in the report.
She says human-induced climate change, resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, is to blame, with greenhouse gases warming the atmosphere and the oceans.
“When a tropical cyclone develops under these warmer conditions, it has access to more energy, increasing the intensity of its wind speeds and associated rainfall,” says Dr Otto.
Fuelled by warm ocean water, tropical cyclones are spreading to previously storm-free regions, shifting towards the poles – as seen when Hurricane Ophelia struck the Iberian Peninsula and Ireland in 2017.
Warmer ocean temperatures are also making rapid intensification of storms more common, making it more difficult to implement warnings, the report says.
Rising temperatures are not only making storms more destructive, they are also adding new dangers such as increased risk of flooding, erosion and landslides in coastal areas due to sea level rise.
Convective storm systems, meanwhile, which range from thunderstorms to long-lived supercells, are seeing increased rainfall due to climate change, since warmer air holds more moisture.
Which countries are most at risk from storms?
Just 10 countries bear the majority of global storm exposure: the Philippines, Mexico, Madagascar, Mauritius, Japan, China, Micronesia, the US, South Korea and Australia, according to the report’s Storm Risk Index, which assessed 193 countries.
Only two European countries fall within the top 100 most at-risk in terms of physical exposure and societal vulnerability: Portugal (69th place) and Ukraine (96th).
While tropical cyclones are rare in Europe, extratropical cyclones are more common. These develop over the sea but are much weaker. However, they still impact weather on land: “Especially in Northern Europe we see an increase in the number of these storms, which means that winters have become much wetter,” says Dr Otto.
Storm risk is unevenly distributed with coastal cities and islands most vulnerable. “Cities like New York and Boston, or Beijing and Tokyo will see tropical cyclones in the future,” says Dr Otto.
The wider World Risk Index, which measures overall disaster risk from all natural hazards, features 13 European countries in the top 100, with Türkiye the only one in the top 50, in 38th place.
Also in the top 100 are Italy (51st), Greece (56th), Spain (58th), France (78th), Albania (81st), Poland (82nd), Portugal (86th), the UK (89th), Croatia (92nd), Belgium (94th), the Netherlands (96th) and Germany (99th).
The importance – and limitations of – early warning systems
“The future significance [of storms] lies not only in their physical intensity, but also in how well societies adapt, through resilient infrastructure, improved forecasting, early warning systems, and climate mitigation efforts,” says Dr Otto.
To be effective, warnings must be worded clearly, reach marginalised groups, and factor in households that need active assistance to evacuate.
“Storm warning systems must reduce vulnerabilities, not just track hazards,” reads the report, urging the use of All-Vulnerability Warning Systems (AVWS), which “consider all hazards, all time scales, and all people”. These could factor in everything from reduced mobility due to societal clothing mandates for women, to the risk of map misreading due to colour blindness.
It also points out that warning systems typically focus on wind – missing the greatest dangers to life: flooding and storm surges. As storms often gain sudden strength just off the coast, these can be hard to predict. Using multi-hazard early warning systems (MHEWS), which take into account air temperature, precipitation type, precipitation amount, wind speed, wind direction, iciness, lightning and tornadoes, can help.
How else can countries prepare for more intense storms?
While state-run, nationwide protections are essential in reducing the devastation of storms, community-based disaster preparedness helps to fill the gaps – for example when people do not have access to a radio or mobile phone.
Insurance can also play a crucial role in the aftermath of a storm. While in the Global North it now covers about half of all storm damage, it is often unavailable or unaffordable for many in the Global South. This tends to slow reconstruction efforts, and can lead to a “spiral of poverty” that lasts generations, the report warns.
In these cases, informal resource sharing is often forced to fill the gaps, but resources tend to become overwhelmed in a crisis.
Besides improvements to warning systems and disaster relief, reducing emissions would in turn slow the intensification of storms with climate change.
“The impacts today are already reaching the limits of what societies can adapt to, as we’ve seen with Hurricane Melissa in 2025,” says Dr Otto. “Thus limiting warming to 1.5°C is crucial for societies to get a chance at adaptation.”
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