When Bernard Weisse first noticed a tiny crack in the outer wall of his house on the outskirts of Paris, he dismissed it as little more than a nuisance. But in the four years since, a spiderweb of fissures has spread from floor to ceiling and snaked into virtually every corner of his home.

“We can hear loud cracking noises especially when it’s warm outside,” said the retired salesman and father of three. “Sometimes, I think we should get all our stuff together and leave.”

Like a growing number of people around the world, Weisse is grappling with subsidence — a term for the sinking land that’s causing damage to homes and other structures built on it. The slow-moving climate disaster has already caused tens of billions in damage and has the potential to affect 1.2 billion people in areas accounting for more than $8 trillion of economic output.

Reprinted courtesy of Claudia Cohen, Bloomberg, Gautam Naik, Bloomberg and Tom Fevrier, Bloomberg