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The world is experiencing an economic upheaval on par with the Great Recession with few people noticing. In fact, the current conventional wisdom is that it’s better not to talk about the source of this disruption, which has quietly transferred trillions of dollars in wealth to less-productive uses.

The roots of this financial calamity are the natural disasters that have grown in number and strength as the planet has warmed. Over the past 12 years, $13.5 trillion in global wealth has been diverted to cleaning up after catastrophes, bracing for new ones and paying insurance companies higher premiums, estimates a recent report from Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Andrew John Stevenson. That roughly matches the cumulative economic losses caused by the Great Recession over 12 years. It’s more than four times the amount lost in the Great Depression, adjusted for inflation. Since 2000, this spending has totaled $20 trillion, by Stevenson’s count.

The US has dedicated more than half of the 12-year total, $7.2 trillion, to the disaster-industrial complex, doubling the costs of the Depression. China has spent $2.4 trillion on preparation and recovery despite not having a private insurance market, and the European Union and UK combined have spent $1.6 trillion.

This spending is good news for companies whose business is cleaning up nature’s messes. Wall Street has noticed this wealth transfer and responded accordingly, to investors’ benefit. This is less helpful to future economic growth, however. Capital that could have been spent on developing the flying cars we were promised instead goes to rebuilding houses and battening down against wildfires and floods.

And these damages will only increase as the environment becomes more chaotic. Each 1 degree Celsius the planet warms above preindustrial averages will gouge 20% from global GDP, according to one estimate published with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Copy of the full article here.

##The United States and other countries are cutting humanitarian relief. Our reporter went to Somalia to see the impact.

When the Trump administration shuttered U.S.A.I.D., it was the beginning of the collapse of the international relief system. Other rich countries quietly cut their own aid budgets. One official told my colleague Peter Goodman that we’re now entering “the post-aid era.”

It was only a matter of time before the world felt the effects during a major crisis. We’re now seeing two. An Ebola outbreak in central Africa may have been compounded by aid cuts that have forced clinics to close. The war in Iran has led to soaring costs for food, fuel and fertilizer. The people hurt are the most vulnerable, who no longer have a safety net.

Peter recently traveled to Somalia to see the impact up close. Today he writes about why the consequences of dismantling humanitarian aid are likely to be felt far beyond that country’s borders.

In more than three decades of journalism, I have seen my share of tragedies, from the Indian Ocean tsunami to wars in Iraq and Cambodia. But what I saw and heard recently in Somalia shocked me.

Somalia is heavily dependent on imports for food, fertilizer and fuel. With shipping effectively halted in the Strait of Hormuz, prices for those critical goods have roughly doubled. In scores of poor and unstable countries, hunger is increasing as the cost of food rises.

Last year, overall humanitarian funding dropped to $28 billion. The U.S. contributed $4 billion. Cuts are continuing.

In Somalia, the impacts of the Iran war are exacerbating a situation that was already dire. The cost of trucking water to the worst drought-hit areas has soared along with the price of fuel. Aid organizations like UNICEF have cut back on trips.

As the price of fertilizer soars, farmers are passing on those extra costs to consumers, raising the price of food. Schools that serve the only meal of the day to students in camps for those displaced by drought and conflict are reducing their portions.

As marine shipping has been diverted from the Strait of Hormuz, traffic jams have emerged at a key port in Oman, a hub for cargo that is transferred onto smaller vessels bound for destinations across East Africa. That is delaying the arrival of what food aid remains.

Aid is certainly about helping people in need. But it has always been an instrument of trade and security policy, too.

No doctorate in history is required to deduce that people generally do not sit calmly and starve in the face of catastrophe. They move where they have a better chance to survive. Many experts anticipate that the drastic reduction of international aid, along with the rising prices for food and fuel, will be catalysts for a fresh wave of migration, potentially stoking new social and political tensions on multiple shores.

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Full copy of the article.

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##See also:

• Reporter details catastrophic humanitarian crisis unfolding amid aid cuts (CNN)

New Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar has visited Poland on his first foreign trip since taking office. Speaking alongside Polish counterpart Donald Tusk, he declared that his government can “learn from Poland” on restoring the rule of law, recovering frozen EU funds, and fighting corruption.

Tusk, meanwhile, hailed Magyar’s “historic victory”, which he said marked “Hungary’s return to Europe” after years of “problematic” rule by Viktor Orbán.

After Magyar won his landslide election victory in April, he confirmed that his first foreign trip as prime minister would be to Poland, which has longstanding ties with Hungary and where Tusk’s centrist, pro-EU government is closely aligned with Magyar’s Tisza party.

Unusually for a visiting foreign leader, Magyar first visited Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city, which was, in the second half of the 19th century and up to 1918, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. There, he visited a number of historical sites connected to Hungary.

Magyar subsequently travelled to Warsaw by train, saying that this gave him an “opportunity to show Hungarians what infrastructure investments have been made” with the support of EU funds.

“Unfortunately, in Hungary over the last 20 years, we haven’t experienced this,” he added, referring to the record of Orbán’s former government.

On Wednesday morning, Magyar met with Tusk, after which the pair spoke at a joint press conference. The Polish prime minister, who also met with Magyar during his election campaign, welcomed his counterpart’s victory.

“It is a sign of hope for millions of people in Europe and around the world that democracy, the rule of law, decency and morality in politics are not lost causes,” declared Tusk, likening it to when his own coalition unseated the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government, an Orbán ally, in 2023.

Tusk said that Poland and Hungary would now be able to “act as one, both in Brussels, on geopolitical matters, and in pursuing various common interests”.

Both he and Magyar indicated the Visegrad Group – a regional forum comprising Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which has been largely moribund in recent years – could now be “renewed and revitalised”, in Tusk’s words.

This, in turn, would help strengthen the region’s voice in the European Union, “to make Europe more like us, because we have a lot to offer Europe”, said the Polish prime minister.

“The heart of Europe beats in Central and Eastern Europe,” added Magyar, who said that he hoped to expand Visegrad’s cooperation to also include Nordic and Balkan countries, as well as Austria.

The Hungarian prime minister, who is being accompanied on his trip to Poland by six of his ministers, said that his government would seek to follow the example of Tusk in restoring the rule of law, recovering frozen EU funds, and fighting corruption.

“Poland is a bit ahead [of us],” said Magyar. “Poland is at the forefront of all these countries [in central Europe]…It is a regional power…I’m very much counting on the [Tusk’s] experience, on the experience of the Polish government, the Polish nation.”

Tusk, meanwhile, said that Poland is “ready to provide assistance” in helping Hungary wean itself off reliance on Russian energy, as Poland itself has done in recent years.

He also expressed hope that, with Magyar in power, it would be easier to “work on a common European position towards Ukraine”. Orbán, a close ally of Moscow, often prevented the EU from taking a common stance in support of Ukraine.

After meeting Tusk, Magyar headed for talks with Polish President Karol Nawrocki, who is aligned with PiS and controversially visited Orbán shortly before the Hungarian elections.

Nawrocki’s office revealed that the pair were due to discuss bilateral relations, regional security and cooperation, and Polish support for Hungary’s efforts to become independent of Russian energy. However, no joint press conference was scheduled.

Subsequently, Magyar will travel onwards to the city of Gdańsk on Poland’s northern Baltic coast, which is Tusk’s hometown. The two prime ministers will meet there with Lech Wałęsa, the former Polish president, anti-communist leader, and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.