Sept. 12 (UPI) — The United States has sustained more than $2.6 trillion in estimated total costs due to hundreds of climate disasters over the past 40 years, according to a new report from a subsidiary of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The comprehensive disaster cost assessment, published Tuesday by the National Centers for Environmental Information, found 371 extreme weather events since 1980 that each exceeded $1 billion in damage.
Costs were incurred through physical damage to residential, commercial, and municipal buildings, and damage to material assets and equipment. Business interruptions and loss of living quarters were taken into consideration, as well as damage to vehicles and boats; public roads, bridges, levees; electrical infrastructure and offshore energy platforms; agricultural assets including crops, livestock, commercial timber; and wildfire suppression.
This year alone there have been 23 confirmed climate disasters in the United States, with 253 people killed and estimated losses topping more than $1 billion in each catastrophe, including two floods, 18 severe storms, one tropical cyclone, one major wildfire, and one blizzard.
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden asked Congress for $16 billion in additional emergency relief funds, $4 billion more than he requested from Congress in August, to deal with costs from Hurricane Idalia and the deadly wildfires in Maui.
Due to those events, the $3.4 billion that remained in FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund was expected to be exhausted in the coming weeks.
In January, NOAA issued a report saying there had been 18 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2022 as climate change was increasingly fueling severe weather nationwide.
On average, the nation was experiencing about eight disasters per year, and an average of about 18 disasters every five years, the report said.
The report also called attention to recent extreme weather, including Tropical Storm Hilary, which in August prompted the first-ever tropical storm watch in southern California before flooding the Southwest with historic rain.
Drought conditions were continuing to grip several Midwest states, impacting agriculture and forcing ranchers to sell livestock due to high feeding costs.
The NCEI tracks oceanic, atmospheric, temperature, and other geophysical data for the U.S. government. The agency said it worked closely with economic experts and other consultants to draw the study’s conclusions.
The report comes amid several recent climate studies that warn of worsening conditions in the decades to come and as the planet experienced the hottest three-month period in its history this summer, punctuated by new heat records across the globe.
