The US has reportedly 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 is said to have surpassed the record of 22 such events set in 2020.
According to Noaa, the total cost of disasters in 2023 has now surpassed $57.6bn. Adam Smith, the Noaa applied climatologist and economist who tracks the billion-dollar disasters said that the record figure does not include major disasters such Tropical Storm Hilary last month, as the cost of damage is still being totaled.
Smith was also quoted as saying that the increase in expensive weather events is caused by a rise in the number of natural disasters and more communities being built in risk-prone locations.
Read also: Firefighters rescue hundreds of people from flooded villages in Greece
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. “Exposure plus vulnerability plus climate change is supercharging more of these into billion-dollar disasters,”.
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 have also said that 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.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
