Choices made on the ground are behind the disaster of Hurricane Harvey

When the history books talk about Hurricane Harvey, the devastating storm that dropped more than 120 centimetres of water on south-east Texas, they'll call it a natural disaster. When the insurance companies – the ones that don't go bankrupt – categorise claims from the storm, they file them under "acts of God”.

In the past three years, Houston has experienced three 500-year floods. 

But though the trillions of gallons of water dropped from the sky – rainfall so immense that meteorologists had to add new colours to their maps, just as Australian meteorologists had to add new colours to capture record high temperatures in the country – the devastation the storm wrought was as much a result of choices made on the ground.

From urban sprawl to housing policy to climate legislation, the city of Houston's fate was shaped in state houses and on Capitol Hill, determined not only by policymakers' actions but by their inactions. And the solutions to the growing threat of storms like Harvey reside there as well.

Read Nicole Hemmer’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Choices made on the ground are behind the disaster of Hurricane Harvey.”

Yes, who will pay for climate change?

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he Munich Reinsurance Company has been in the sober business of managed risk since 1880. Munich Re, as it is now known, helped pay for the devastation caused by the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and the assault on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The company, which in 2014 paid out approximately $45 billion in claims and netted $4 billion in profit, employs some 43,000 people—underwriters, economists, accountants, lawyers, and scientists—all working to predict and plan for the future, and with a shared mission: to make sure Munich Re is never surprised. Risk properly calculated makes money for Munich Re; risk unanticipated could bankrupt it.

These days, the greatest unpredictable risk Munich Re faces is climate change. Like other major insurers, Munich Re follows a standard procedure to ensure its premiums are set high enough to cover natural-catastrophe claims.

Read the Jeffrey Ball story on New Republic - “Who will pay for climate change?”

This is 'Earth Overshoot Day" - we are now living in daily debt

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n this day in August 2015, humans have used an entire year’s worth of the Earth’s natural resources, according to the Global Footprint Network.

Calling it Earth Overshoot Day, the group celebrates — or, rather, notes — the day by which people have used more natural resources, such as fish stocks, timber, and even carbon emissions, than the Earth can regenerate in a single year. It’s basically a balance sheet for global accounting.

“We can overuse nature quite easily,” Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network, told ThinkProgress. “When you start to spend more than you earn, it does not become immediately apparent. But, eventually, you go bankrupt.”

Read the ClimateProgress story - “Happy Earth Overshoot Day! We’ve Now Used All Our Resources For The Year.”