A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made headlines last week when it described an increase in floods, droughts, heat waves and other extreme weather, and put some of the blame for those changes on greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities.

The report, released Friday in Kampala, Uganda, recommends taking steps now to increase the world's ability to adapt and cope with climate extremes, warning that "a changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events."

Experts in insurance, investment and international development say it's a message they've been trying to get across for years, and the new report -- which comes at the tail end of a year of wild weather -- may help hammer it home as diplomats head to South Africa later this month for U.N. climate talks.

"This report does a really good job setting the stage for that meeting," said Keya Chatterjee, international climate policy director for the World Wildlife Fund. "That meeting has squarely on its agenda the issue of adapting to the impacts of climate change -- and it happens to be on a continent, Africa, that has been really devastated by extreme weather events."

The IPCC report, written by climate scientists and experts in disaster risk management, emphasizes that the severity of disaster impacts depends not just on the strength of a particular storm or the length of a drought, but on social, geographic and economic factors. Between 1970 and 2008, the report says, more than 95 percent of deaths caused by natural disasters occurred in developing countries, while the largest economic losses from climate extremes have been recorded in richer, developed nations.

'We all pay'

"What this report brings out is the enormous disparities that exist in different parts of the world," said IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, "not only in terms of the severity of the events we're talking about, but also the differences in vulnerability and the capacity to adapt."

One of the issues negotiators are expected to tackle at the Durban talks is how to structure and finance the proposed $100 billion Green Climate Fund, intended to help the world's most vulnerable nations cope with climate change.

"The economic calculus is presented quite clearly in the report," said Tim Gore, climate change policy adviser for Oxfam. "In the end, the choice isn't whether we pay -- we all pay, wherever we are in the world. Some people pay with their lives. Some people pay with dollars. The question is whether you invest a smaller amount up front, in building resilience for poor people, or whether you pay a lot later, in the costs of rebuilding after a disaster and with the lives of poor people."

The report recommends adopting "low-regret" strategies that will help reduce long-term risks from extreme weather and natural disasters while providing immediate benefits in quality of life for people in areas at risk.

In West Africa, the report notes, a combination of "less advanced" agricultural practices, population growth, degraded ecosystems, overuse of natural resources and poor health, education and governance increases the region's vulnerability to drought and changes in seasonal rainfall patterns.

There, "low-regrets" measures to reduce drought's toll include creating early-warning systems to inform people when drought appears likely, improving the efficiency of irrigation systems and planting drought-resistant crop varieties, the IPCC report says.

In urban parts of Europe, where the report says there is a 66 to 100 percent chance that heat waves will become more frequent, more intense and longer during this century, it recommends educating the public about how to cope with heat waves, identifying especially vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, and adding more green space to cities, among other measures.

Heavy toll on insurers and the insured

"This is the kind of information that will help further discussion of climate change as a fundamental economic issue," said Mark Way, head of the Sustainability Americas Hub for reinsurer Swiss Re. "One of the areas where the international debate can move forward in the current atmosphere is on the adaptation side."

Mark Fulton, global head of climate change investment research at Deutsche Bank, said that global investors are increasingly aware of the economic risks posed by climate change and extreme weather, "but there is a long way to go." The IPCC report, he said, will help bring the issue to the forefront for the investment industry.

Insurers are already well aware of the those risks, experts said.

David Friedberg is CEO of the Climate Corp., which sells insurance to farmers seeking financial protection from crop losses caused by weather events.

He says weather extremes are already changing the way he does business -- and taking an economic toll on his clients. "What we have seen is an increase in the frequency of extreme drought, rainfall and temperature events," he said. "We've charged more over the past two seasons than we have historically, and we will continue to charge more as the likelihood of these events increases."

That's in line with broader trends described by Way. Between 1970 and 2010, half of the 40 most costly insured losses globally were caused by weather events in the United States, he said.

Climate change is a factor in some of those disaster losses, Way said, along with increasing population density near the coasts and increased property values.

This year, there have been at least 10 disasters in the United States that have caused at least $1 billion each in damages, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- including flooding along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, drought in the Southern Plains and southwestern United States, five separate tornado outbreaks in Southern and central states, and a blizzard.

Rising probability of climate-related events

Jerry Meehl, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, says the new IPCC report illustrates something about climate change that many people don't intuitively grasp: Small changes in the "background" climate can have big effects on the day-to-day weather people actually experience.

"People ask me, 'Well, you guys say the average climate has only warmed about a degree, so what?'" Meehl said. "I say, 'Yeah, but that small shift in the average means a larger change in the extremes that you actually see.'"

Being able to identify those changes in extreme events and understand whether climate change has influenced them is a relatively new development, said Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern, co-chairman of the IPCC's physical science working group.

"Extreme events are among the most complex physical processes in the environmental system on this planet," he said. "It is very challenging to make a scientific link between increasing greenhouse gases and extreme events -- but nevertheless the science has progressed significantly in the last five to 10 years. We can actually attribute the increase in hot days in the past few years to increased greenhouse gases."

While the new report focuses on long-term trends in extreme weather, scientists are now pushing the envelope even further, seeking to determine whether climate change is a factor in individual weather events, like the Russian heat wave of 2010.

"Ten years ago, people would have just given the standard line that we can't attribute one individual event to greenhouse gases, but the probability of an event like a heat wave goes up as you warm temperatures up," said David Easterling, chief of the Global Applications Division at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. "Now we're stepping back and taking a harder look at that -- asking, can we say anything about an individual event and its severity relative to climate change?"