As Barbados counts the cost of damage from Hurricane Beryl, new research has concluded that the island took a $600 million hit from natural disasters over the past 20 years.
While storms, floods, drought and earthquakes affected Barbadians in that period, these estimated economic losses were due to storms alone, based on information from the Emergency Events Database (EM-Dat), a global initiative.
Christopher Kinch, a senior economist in the research and economic analysis department of the Central Bank of Barbados, said this information illustrated how, based on their level of vulnerability, “many countries within the region, including Barbados, are heavily exposed to the external risks that natural disasters pose”.
He examined the issue in a new analysis titled Potential Impact Of Climate Change On Caribbean Economies, which is published in the 2023 Financial Stability Report (FSR).
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