The Environment Ministry plans to estimate possible damage if typhoons hit the Japanese archipelago should global warming progress.
By presenting actual examples of anticipated damage from typhoons, which are expected to worsen because of global warming, the ministry aims to encourage local governments to improve disaster preparedness.
Research for the estimate will start in fiscal 2020. A team featuring the National Institute for Environmental Studies, the Meteorological Research Institute and several universities will jointly conduct the study, using supercomputers.
The team hypothesizes that two types of typhoons, which follow the same paths as Typhoon No. 19 in October and Typhoon No. 21 in September 2018, occurred during warmer periods.
Typhoon No. 21 caused severe damage to areas that included Kansai Airport. The team then estimates the extent of damage such as amount of precipitation, wind speeds, floods, blackouts, among others, by region in each condition.
The hypothetical temperatures for the study are set according to the increased global average temperatures, which are 2 C and 4 C, respectively, above those prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century.
The Paris Agreement, an international framework for measures against global warming, aims to keep the increase in the global average temperature to less than 2 C above the temperature before the industrial revolution. But some experts argue that if sufficient countermeasures were not taken, the temperature could rise by about 4 C.
In the study, the team will also examine the difference in the scale of damages if temperatures rose by 2 C and 4 C.
It is feared the progress of global warming will raise the intensity of typhoons because of the jump in sea temperatures, among other factors.
The environment ministry had budgeted 70 million yen for this study.
It plans to announce a report summarizing the impact of climate change, based on latest papers at the end of fiscal 2020, which will include the results of this study.
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