With four months of 2023 still left, the US has set a record for the most natural disasters in a single year that have cost $1bn or more, as fires, floods and ferocious winds were among deadly events experts warn are being turbo-charged by the climate crisis.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) announced on Monday that there have already been 23 extreme weather events in the US this year that have cost at least $1bn. The current figure surpasses the record of 22 such events set in 2020.
So far, the total cost of disasters in 2023 is more than $57.6bn, according to Noaa.
The record figure does not include major disasters such Tropical Storm Hilary last month, as the cost of damage is still being totaled, Adam Smith, the Noaa applied climatologist and economist who tracks the billion-dollar disasters, told the Associated Press. Hilary brought life-threatening flooding and rainfall to the US south-west, leaving thousands of people without power.
Smith said the increase in expensive weather events was caused by a rise in the number of natural disasters and more communities being built in risk-prone locations.
“Exposure plus vulnerability plus climate change is supercharging more of these into billion-dollar disasters,” Smith said.
Eight new billion-dollar disasters were added to the list in an update last month. The Hawaii wildfires that killed at least 115 people on Maui were added, with damages there projected to cost upwards of $5.5bn. Hurricane Idalia also caused more than $1bn in damage, as the category 3 hurricane devastated Florida at the end of August.
Other events listed by Noaa included severe summer weather, including a Minnesota hailstorm and storms in the north-east, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.
“This year a lot of the action has been across the center states, north central, south and south-eastern states,” Smith.
Experts have long pointed out that climate disasters and extreme weather create exceptionally large costs for local governments.
Last week, more than 60 million Americans were under heat alerts, an extreme weather event that cities have struggled to allocate funding towards.
Experts say the US has to do more to adapt to increased disasters as they are only projected to get worse.
“The climate has already changed, and neither the built environment nor the response systems are keeping up with the change,” the former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Craig Fugate said.
The increase in weather disasters is consistent with what climate scientists have long been saying, along with a possible boost this year from the natural El Niño phenomenon, the University of Arizona climate scientist Katharine Jacobs said.
“Adding more energy to the atmosphere and the oceans will increase intensity and frequency of extreme events,” Jacobs said. “Many of this year’s events are very unusual and in some cases unprecedented.”
Smith added that he had thought the 2020 record would last for a long time because the $20bn cost of disasters that year smashed the old record of $16bn.
It didn’t, and Smith says he no longer believes new records will last long, either.
The Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field called the trend in billion-dollar disasters “very troubling”.
“But there are things we can do to reverse the trend,” Field said. “If we want to reduce the damages from severe weather, we need to accelerate progress on both stopping climate change and building resilience.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
