Multibillion-dollar natural disasters are the new normal

Ditching fossil fuels to minimise climate disruption won't be cheap or easy. But with every billion-dollar disaster, we're reminded that failing to do so will be increasingly expensive, and deadly.

Already this year the US has suffered seven natural disasters costing $1 billion or more in damages, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported this week. These include flooding in California, spring storms in the Midwest and Southeast and a winter storm in the Northeast. As recently as the early 2000s, seven billion-dollar disasters would have been considered a typical year. Now it's a typical early-May tally — and we're still months away from the peak of wildfire and hurricane seasons.

The pace of such catastrophes has risen exponentially in the past few years, almost in lockstep with the rise in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and global temperatures, according to a study published last month in the Journal of Climate Change and Health. As the world's governments don't plan to zero out their countries' emissions for decades, we can expect carbon concentrations to keep rising, making the planet hotter and natural disasters more frequent and intense.  

In the 1980s, the US averaged just three billion-dollar disasters per year, according to the study. In the past five years, that average has risen to nearly 18.

Those numbers don't truly convey the growing scope of these catastrophes. Last year may have been an average year in the new normal, but its 18 major events cost a total of $175.2 billion, according to the NOAA, making it the third-costliest year on record. Three of the five costliest years have occurred since 2017, with a total tab of $710 billion — swamping the $369 billion in federal climate spending approved in last year's Inflation Reduction Act.

And these figures merely reflect rebuilding expenses. They ignore the cost in lives, which is also increasing, and lost economic opportunities. In the 1980s, about 300 people a year died, on average, in billion-dollar disasters. That average rose to 523 in the 2010s.

But even as the number of expensive calamities soars, Americans keep moving into the teeth of them. Florida, Texas, Arizona and other states at increasing risk of deadly weather have been the country's fastest-growing states in recent years. That has helped push the cost of home insurance to the point that many homeowners are skipping extra coverage for floods and other such events, the New York Times reported last week. Nationwide Insurance has said two-thirds of US homes don't have enough insurance. Of course this is exactly the kind of thing Nationwide Insurance would say, but it's easy to see homeowners balking as premiums rise. The result could be that they bear more of the expenses when tragedy strikes.

Climate-proofing is certainly becoming a central issue for corporate America, with rating agencies, asset managers and activist investors pushing companies to account and prepare for climate risks, no matter the cost. 

Poll after poll shows two-thirds of Americans want action on climate change, but the fossil fuel industry and its allies have tried to slow down real action, arguing energy transition costs will be too much to bear. They're nothing compared to the price of delay.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.