Transcript:
The wildfires in Los Angeles last year killed more than two dozen people and caused about $60 billion in damage.
They were the costliest U.S. wildfires on record.
And expensive disasters like fires, hurricanes, and storms have become more common, even after adjusting for inflation.
Smith: “The frequency of these billion-dollar disasters has changed from about once every 82 days to once every roughly two weeks over the last 10 years.”
Adam Smith at the nonprofit Climate Central runs the U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which tracks disaster costs.
The federal government ran this database until last year, when the Trump administration cut the program.
But businesses, researchers, and public officials rely on this data, so Climate Central picked up where the government left off.
Smith says disaster costs are rising because people are building in disaster-prone places, many areas have inadequate building codes, and extreme weather is getting worse.
Smith: “Human-caused climate change is supercharging the intensity and the frequency of some of these extremes that lead to billion-dollar disasters.”
And the coming years will likely bring even more costly disasters.
Smith: “So this data we’re providing is increasingly important as we plan for the future.”
Reporting credit: Ethan Freedman / ChavoBart Digital Media
