Last May, Peter Hoeppe of Munich Re and I organized a workshop to bring together a diverse group of international experts in the fields of climatology and disaster research. The general questions to be answered at the workshop were:

* What factors account for increasing costs of weather related disasters in recent decades?

* What are the implications of these understandings, for both research and policy?

We are happy to release our final workshop report. From the workshop home page you can download PDFs of:

*The entire report (8 mb)
*Executive Summary
*Summary Report
*Individual participant white papers from:

* C. Bals
* L. Bouwer
* R. Brázdil
* H. Brooks
* I. Burton
* R. Crompton et al.
* A. Dlugolecki
* P. Epstein
* E. Faust et al.
* I. Goklany
* H. Grenier
* B. R. Gurjar et al.
* J. Helminen
* S. Jun
* C. Kemfert and K. Schumacher
* T. Knutson
* R. Muir-Wood et al.
* R. Pielke, Jr.
* S. Raghavan
* G. Tetzlaff
* E. Tompkins
* H. von Storch and R. Weisse
* Q. Ye
* R. Zapata-Marti

The workshop’s major sponsors were Munich Re and the U.S. National Science Foundation, with contributing sponsorship from the GKSS Institute for Coastal Research and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.