So far in 2023, the United States experienced 23 confirmed climate disasters, each causing over $1 billion in damages and 253 lives, according to NOAA. It has already surpassed the 2020 record of 22 events, which was for an entire calendar year. The disasters have included floods, severe storms, hurricanes, raging wildfires, and more, resulting in an estimated total recovery cost of more than $50 billion.

NOAA Applied Climatologist Adam Smith sheds light on the report and why these disasters are so costly. Smith says there are a reasons why the costs are going up including where people are living and population density. He also says there is "vulnerability, where we build, how we build, but also how we rebuild after a disaster is increasingly important."

Video Transcript

BRAD SMITH: Well, this year has been a whirlwind, literally. During the first eight months of 2023, there were 23 confirmed weather and climate disaster events leading to losses exceeding $1 billion each. These events included two flooding events, 18 severe storm events, one tropical cyclone, one winter storm, and one wildfire.

And overseas near the coastal city of Derna, more than 5,000 are dead, and at least 20,000 people are displaced in Libya after torrential rains caused two dams to burst. The flood has destroyed much of the city and carried entire neighborhoods into the sea. For more on what billion dollar natural disasters mean for the economy globally as well here, Adam Smith NOAA Applied Climatologist.

Adam, it's just been remarkable the stories, the images, the preparation, and the recovery that we've seen time and time again as many of these systems become more severe. Help us just wrap our minds around what we've seen in terms of the type of recovery that's been necessary after some of the more severe weather patterns of recent years and months.

ADAM SMITH: All right. Thank you. Yeah, it has been striking that just through the first eight months of this year we've had 23 confirmed billion dollar or higher impact events related to weather and climate extremes. So we've had a hurricane, you know, Idelia impact Florida. We've of course, have hurricane Lee right now that might impact Maine and Nova Scotia. But that's still to be determined.

But many of the impacts across the central, the southern, the southeastern states were high wind, hail tornado events. We also had a winter storm in the Northeast, and of course, the atmospheric rivers that hit California. A silver lining with that really diminished the drought impacts that California had been under for many years. So the short end of the story is that we've had a lot of events but a high diversity across many different states. And of course, Hawaii, the tragic wildfires that happened there as well.

JULIE HYMAN: Adam, put this in perspective for us how this compares to past years and whether we're seeing sort of a gradual increase over time, or whether it's sort of volatile how many of these events we get in a given year.

ADAM SMITH: Yes, so over the last 44 years we've been doing this analysis since 1980, and it's all inflation adjusted using the CPI metric which accounts for about 87% of US population and all the different indices that go into economics. And so we shattered the record that was just set in 2020 which was 22 events for the full calendar year. And that event-- that year actually had shattered their previous record.

Back in 2017, we had 16 such events. So indeed, the frequency of these events is rapidly escalating. And in addition, the cost is also escalating five out of the last six years, dating back to 2017. The cumulative cost on an annual basis has been in excess of $100 billion. Before 2017, that only happened two other times, 2005 when we had Hurricane Katrina and some other storms, and 2012 when we had Superstorm Sandy.

JULIE HYMAN: And Adam, is the cost going up because it's happening in more populated areas? What are some of the factors behind that cost going up?

ADAM SMITH: Yeah, great question. So it's a multiple factors that are contributing to this increase. Number one, exposure, we have more people and more assets in harm's way, whether it's the wildland urban interface, people living along the coast, or the flood plains. Also the concentration of the density of populations and assets in cities contributes to that.

But on top of that, we have vulnerability, where we build, how we build, but also how we rebuild after disaster is increasingly important. Building codes, it's a lot of variability in building codes around the nation. But finally, climate change is supercharging some of these extremes that lead to building disasters. The wildfires and the drought out west, the floods out east. We've had more billion dollar floods in the 2010s decade than we had in the three decades combined.

And the Hurricanes, we've just been partly and lucky, but also partly, we have a lot of exposure and vulnerability on our coastline. So you know, I think that we need to learn from these extremes. They will continue to happen. Build resilience into our local economies into our infrastructure into our homes and our businesses, so we can better mitigate future costs in the future.

BRAD SMITH: You know, we've spoken to a lot of CEOs and top brass, especially within the food and beverage industry, about how they're changing some of their operations because of climate change, whether that's sourcing, whether that is just the facilities that they're operating as well. Is there an anticipated kind of effect to which and how climate change is actually supercharging industry overhauls from what NOAA has studied to this point?

ADAM SMITH: Yeah, I think that executives, other officers that are planning out in the future for doing spends and trying to look at resources, if they're wise, they're looking at how we're having wet or wet events dry or dry events, really the hydrologic cycle is being amplified, which means more volatility and your baseline expectation of commodity. So for example, if you make beer, you need fresh, clean, abundant water. Well, you might not go to the Southwest for that because of the drought impacts in the recent decades. But also in future decades, it's US Southwest is plan-- it looks like it will just continue to get worse.

So think that indeed the distribution of natural resources and how extremes makes an impact on those resources, that's really a growing area of focus I think if you want to make a wise investment.

JULIE HYMAN: Are we yet seeing any effects on, say, migration patterns, Adam, as a result of all of this? One would think if a place keeps getting flooded, people wouldn't keep moving there. On an anecdotal basis, they still seem to be. But I don't know what you're seeing that the data is showing.

ADAM SMITH: Yeah that's actually an interesting question because-- so the three most impacted states over the last four decades or even the last five or six years would be Texas, Florida, and Louisiana. A lot of this is Hurricane driven impacts. As we know, people continue to move in droves to places like Texas and Florida for a variety of reasons. But places like Louisiana, I think that these back to back to back hurricanes and floods and severe storms are-- we're seeing actually a population decrease in some of the regions of Louisiana because-- partly because of perhaps the extremes and the disasters are just one burden too much to handle.

And I think that for certain regions that have these compound disasters that just continue to pile upon on one another, that may continue to redistribute the population around the nation in fact.

JULIE HYMAN: All right. We'll see if it ends up starting to happen in more numbers. Adam Smith, really interesting insight here. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Applied Climatologist, thank you.

ADAM SMITH: Thank you.