Climate Central is an independent nonprofit organization that researches and communicates the impacts of climate change through data-driven analysis. As extreme weather events become more frequent and costly, reliable disaster data is increasingly important for understanding how these events affect communities and the economy.
In this Q&A, Climate Central Senior Climate Impacts Scientist Adam Smith discusses the organization’s work tracking the economic costs of weather and climate disasters, how those costs are measured, and what decades of data reveal about the changing risks associated with extreme weather.
Q: How has the importance of databases tracking weather and climate disasters grown as catastrophic events have become more frequent?
A: The Billion-Dollar Disaster analysis is vital in demonstrating the economic impact of extreme weather and climate events in inflation-adjusted dollars, and in helping communicate the real-world consequences of climate change to communities, policymakers, and the public. It provides a publicly accessible web interface with comprehensive tools and disaster information designed to help people better understand a changing environment and its impacts. The platform integrates disaster, risk, and socioeconomic data, providing additional context and depth to the questions that can be explored and helping users better understand not only where disasters occur, but also their broader economic and societal consequences.
Q: How can the financial impact of these events be accurately measured?
A: Over the coming months, we are undertaking a major expansion of the dataset to include events meeting a 100 million dollar threshold from 1980 to the present. This expanded record will provide a much more complete picture of the Nation’s disaster experience, highlighting the significant impacts of small- and medium-sized disasters and how their frequency, geographic distribution, and costs are changing over time.
The Billion-Dollar Disaster analysis is an important resource for demonstrating the economic consequences of extreme weather and climate events using inflation-adjusted dollars. It also helps translate complex data into an understanding of the real-world consequences of these events for communities, policymakers, businesses, researchers, and the public.
When NOAA stopped updating the Billion-Dollar Disasters dataset, it became clear that the information was simply too important to allow the record to lapse. Demand for continued updates came from across society including decision-makers, the private sector, academia, and local communities, underscoring the broad need for consistent, authoritative information on the economic impacts of extreme events. The importance of this work was recently reinforced when the research was briefed to more than a dozen bipartisan US Senators during a roundtable discussion on extreme weather and its impacts. The discussion further underscored the critical role that comprehensive, accessible information on extreme events plays in helping decision-makers and the public understand the evolving risks facing communities across the Nation.
To assess costs, we use the most comprehensive public and private sector data sources available, representing the estimated total costs of these events – that is, the costs in dollars that would not have been incurred had the event not taken place. Importantly, Climate Central’s disaster cost assessments are led by the same scientist, data partners and methods as what was done at NOAA over the decades. More than a dozen public and private sector data sources help capture the total, direct costs (both insured and uninsured) of weather and climate events.
These costs include: physical damage to residential, commercial, and municipal buildings; material assets (content) within buildings; time element losses such as business interruption or loss of living quarters; damage to vehicles and boats; public assets including roads, bridges, and levees; electrical infrastructure and offshore energy platforms; agricultural assets including crops, livestock, and commercial timber; and wildfire suppression costs, among others.
However, these disaster costs do not account for losses to natural capital or environmental degradation; mental or physical healthcare-related costs; the value of a statistical life (VSL); or supply chain and contingent business interruption costs.
Q: How have you seen views on climate change-related disasters alter as severe storms, wildfires, and temperature changes become evident in day-to-day life?
A: The average number of billion-dollar disasters per year has grown from about three events annually during the 1980s to 20 events annually during the last 10 years. Over the same period, the direct costs of billion-dollar disasters have surged. The rise in disaster costs is a human-made problem. Trends in where we decide to live and how we build make communities more vulnerable to these extremes. We also cannot overlook the impact from human-caused climate change increasing the intensity and frequency of some types of extreme events. But either way you look at it, the rise in damages relates to human activities
Q: Have you seen pushback from opposition, whether political or entrenched economic forces, to showing the direct impacts of climate change?
A: Extreme weather affects all of us – our homes, families, communities, and livelihoods. We can’t prevent every extreme event, but we can learn from what has happened, reduce our risks, and take steps today to be better prepared for the climate-enhanced extremes on the horizon.
Q: How does the CSI (Climate Shift Index) create up-to-date models across different geographies and what are the long-term trends that can be drawn from this modeling?
A: Climate Central’s real-time Climate Shift Index system uses a combination of weather forecasts, observational data, and climate model data to quantify how much climate change is contributing to air temperature, ocean temperature, humid heat, and hurricane intensity on a daily basis. The real-time climate data coming into the system comes from a few different sources: NOAA’s GFS model for temperature and humid heat, NOAA’s OISST data for ocean temperature, and the National Hurricane Center’s data for active hurricanes.
In addition to being able to explore recent daily data in our online tools, We have generated a hindcast of our CSI data that goes back to the 1970s. What that means is that we can look at any day, anywhere on the planet going back decades and get a sense of how much climate change was influencing the conditions people experienced. And we can see how the influence of climate change has grown over the last half century. For instance, our recent report on humid heat found that climate change has increased the number of days with dangerous humid heat in the majority of US cities.
