Highlights - Chris Funk - Dir., Climate Hazards Center - Author of “Drought, Flood, Fire…”

““One of the things I tried to share in my book Drought, Fire, Flood is that it's not hard, if you look at the data, to see how harmful and impactful climate change is right now. We're seeing horrendous droughts play out across East Africa, an unprecedented level of droughts, but these impacts are also costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And the cost of reducing our emissions is not that great. I think the estimate is something like a trillion dollars a year for the entire globe, which sounds like a lot of money, but that's about 1% of global GDP. So we can certainly afford to make a big dent in our emissions.”

Chris Funk is the Director of the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) at UC Santa Barbara. He works with an international team of Earth scientists to inform weather and famine-related disaster responses. Chris studies climate and climate change while also developing improved data sets and monitoring/prediction systems. He’s the author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes and co-author with Shrad Shukla of Drought Early Warning and Forecasting. While his research interests are quite diverse, a central theme uniting Chris’ work is developing both the technical/scientific resources and the conceptual frameworks that will help us cope with increasingly dangerous climate and weather extremes.

www.chc.ucsb.edu

www.chc.ucsb.edu/people/chris-funk

Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes

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