A more precise understanding of how global warming weighs on weather extremes could feed into calls by developing countries for the richer world to pay for their historical emissions, in a decades-long debate known as “loss and damage”, according to SMU Associate Professor of Urban Climate Winston Chow. “It is front and centre. The extreme weather that we have seen and will continue to see is going to make this conversation much more heated and much more topical for this coming Conference of Parties and the next one in Dubai,” Assoc Prof Chow said, referring to the annual global climate change conferences that have produced landmark pacts such as the Paris Agreement. Assoc Prof Chow also questioned, “From a reinsurance perspective, and from the private sector, how can we make the case that things that usually were “acts of God” within the realms of natural variability are no longer natural?” He added, “The fine tuning of how impacts can be understood by different stakeholders, such as the finance sector, might get more mileage than it has now.”