No country is rich enough to save itself from the damage of cyclones like Alfred

Every morning this week, I’ve checked on Cyclone Alfred, which has been hovering off Australia’s east coast since late February.

As we waited for the storm to make landfall, the New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, warned on Thursday that if rivers rose like they did during the floods of 2022, there simply wouldn’t be enough resources for all those affected. “We cannot guarantee a boat for every house in the flood evacuation zone,” he said – a stark admission to make about one of the world’s richest countries.

And yet, he was right; we’re still nowhere near ready for the realities of extreme weather – especially with climate change supercharging storms, sending them further south and making them far less predictable than before.

Although people in these parts of Australia aren’t strangers to disasters – the northeast of Australia is a hotspot for tropical storms – it’s rare that a cyclone-like event would spread as far south as Brisbane, let alone cross the state line into New South Wales. The last time Brisbane saw a tropical storm like this was back in 1990. Further south in the Gold Coast, acting mayor Donna Gates said this might be the worst storm since 1952.

When Alfred did eventually make landfall yesterday, it thankfully didn’t make quite the impact expected, with locals referring to it as a “fizzer”. It was soon downgraded from a cyclone to a tropical storm and while many communities have been impacted – at the time of writing, more than 330,000 homes and businesses remain without power; flood warnings span across 11 rivers; and in some towns, a year’s worth of rain has fallen over a weekend – broadly speaking, it was a “near miss”.

It’s too soon to say exactly how much climate change influenced Alfred’s movement, but scientists have been warning that warmer seas are making tropical storms stronger, slower, and less predictable. If this trend continues, and storms start hitting places that historically never had to prepare for them, the economic consequences will be immense.

Just three years ago, this coast was inundated with floods that devastated northern New South Wales. A year before that, the east coast was awash with another type of disaster, as the country’s worst fires on record were exacerbated by heatwaves that burnt up to 19 million hectares – including my family’s farm – and impacted nearly 3 billion animals.

Assessments will take a while, but Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese has already said there is “no question” Alfred will have an impact on the national economy. Insurance customers have so far lodged 3,000 claims over two days and an “insurance catastrophe” has been declared for southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales.

But disasters like these are overwhelming even the most prepared nations globally. Compared to this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, or the devastation left by Typhoon Yagi last year, Alfred is an almost routine disaster.

How much longer will we be counting on luck?

Australia has already felt the financial burden of escalating extreme weather. The 2022 floods – some of the worst in the country’s history – caused an estimated AU$7bn in insured losses, forcing thousands of people into long-term displacement. In the lead-up to Alfred’s landfall, many businesses in the region revealed they had not yet recovered from the last flood, and couldn’t withstand another.

In New Zealand, Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 caused NZ$14bn damage, making it one of the country’s most expensive weather disasters on record.

And the United States? In 2023 alone, the country saw 28 separate climate disasters, each costing over $1bn – the highest number of billion-dollar disasters in a single year. FEMA, the country’s disaster relief agency, has come dangerously close to running out of funds multiple times as hurricanes, wildfires, and floods grow more destructive.

As climate disasters intensify, insurance companies are pulling out of more and more areas they call “high risk”. Friends of mine have had their insurance cancelled already this year, and premium hikes have priced many out of the insurance market altogether.

If this is what rich countries are facing, how high will the human and economic toll rise in less-privileged countries? Especially as long-made promises of aid and global solidarity shift in today's global political climate.

In Pakistan, the 2022 floods displaced more than 33 million people and caused $30bn in damages – equivalent to 10 per cent of the country’s entire GDP. Mozambique has been hit by five tropical cyclones in just four years, forcing mass evacuations and pushing thousands into poverty.

Unlike Australia or the US, these countries don’t have the financial cushion to rebuild, or access to agreeable terms of debt. Yet, the world’s richest nations have been slow to act. The UN’s loss and damage fund, meant to help vulnerable nations recover from climate disasters, has moved at monumental pace in recent years (in UN terms) but it remains far from helping anyone on the ground.

And this isn’t just about fairness. If countries with fewer resources are left to fend for themselves, it will create ripple effects globally – through economic instability, migration shifts, and worsening inequality.

Cyclone Alfred will likely fade from the news cycle within days, replaced by the next disaster somewhere else in the world. But the pattern is clear: the cost of these events is rising, yet governments are spending more on rebuilding than preventing damage in the first place.

So what needs to change?

If insurers continue retreating from disaster-prone areas, more people will be left unprotected. Governments will have to decide whether to step in with subsidies or let communities fend for themselves. In Australia, there are murmurings about whether there is a renewed role for a national insurance agency. Those murmurs will rise after this week.

But as tropical storms shift southward, rainfall patterns become increasingly unreliable, and tides surge, places like Australia will start facing climate disasters they’ve never experienced before. Rich nations will need to invest more in their own adaptation, but if their own experience fails to inspire empathy globally, we will find ourselves in an increasingly unjust and insecure world.

Global adaptation needs are already in the billions – and will be in the trillions soon. When layered on top of existing debt, the economic risks alone will require a real rethink of how insurance and rebuilding is funded around the world. Our traditional economic models are increasingly limiting their nets of protection. For many, they have never offered one.

As disasters become more frequent, we need to decide what kind of world we want to live in. One where we invest in preparation, or one where every new storm is met with the same cycle of destruction, panic, and inadequate response.

Because if this past week has taught us anything, it’s that if a climate-fuelled disaster is headed your way – no country can guarantee safety for its people.