The United Nations-convened Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has flagged Australia faces more floods in the future unless it makes more efforts to reverse man-made carbon emissions sharply.

Released last week, the IPCC report’s chapter on Australasia says the current 1-in-100-year flood in Australia could occur several times a year because of climate change.

The warning from IPCC comes as Queensland and NSW battle severe flooding, which S&P Global Ratings has predicted could be a $2 billion event for the insurance industry.

The IPCC report says three major floods hit eastern Australia from 2019 to last year.

In relation to finance, the report says with high confidence the finance sector including insurance has significant exposure to climate variability and extreme events, and that it will possibly get worse in the coming years.

Risks for the finance sector, including for insurance providers, are projected to increase, the report says.

“The core thing is that the climate risks which Australia is exposed to are likely to increase significantly… particularly looking at extreme events of different types that often are insurable,” IPCC Vice Chair Mark Howden said.

Professor Howden, who is also Director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, says there’s been “a lot more change” since the IPPC released its Fifth Assessment report in 2014.

“We’ve always had the risk of bad storms, east coast lows… but climate change is just making that risk worse,” Professor Howden told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

The floods now inundating Queensland and NSW are an example of how climate change is “embedded” in extreme weather events, he said.

Last week’s Working Group II report is the second instalment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, which will be completed this year and it comes eight years after the last report.