A report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released in August 2021 found that the annual incidence of natural disasters worldwide driven by more extreme weather (driven at least in part by climate change) or water hazards has increased by 500 percent over the last 50 years. Such disasters now occur on a daily basis on average, causing more than $200 million in losses and killing 115 people every day. Over the period of 1970-2019, these 11,000 disasters led to more than 2 million deaths and $3.64 trillion in damages. However, on a decade-by-decade basis, deaths caused by these disasters have fallen steadily, from more than 50,000 during the 1970’s to less than 20,000 in the first decade of the 21st century, attributed largely to improvements in advance warning mechanisms and disaster management.. WMO is a specialized agency of the United Nations headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, which is charged with “promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. “
Over the period studied, weather, climate, and water hazards accounted for about half of all disasters, and 74 percent of all reported losses from disasters. Of all deaths attributed to natural disasters, 91 percent occurred in developing countries. Three of the 10 costliest natural disasters were hurricanes which hit the United States and several Caribbean island nations in a single year, 2017: Hurricane Harvey, which dropped torrents of rainfall on Texas and elsewhere, caused $97 billion in damages, Hurricane Maria, a category 5 hurricane which slammed several islands in the Caribbean including the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States, generated nearly $70 billion in damages, and Hurricane Irma, which also hit several islands in the Caribbean as well as Florida in the continental United States, caused $58 billion in damages. It was the one-two punch of Irma followed by Maria two weeks later which damaged crucial infrastructure and knocked out power in parts of Puerto Rico for several months.
In the United States, NOAA has determined that a variety of natural disasters in 2021 generated $145 billion in damages, with 20 distinct weather and climate disasters which generated at least $1 billion in damages for each set of events. In terms of disaster-caused losses, that total ranks 2021 as third highest in U.S. history, behind only 2017 and 2005 (which includes Hurricane Katrina’s massive impact on the U.S. Gulf states). The list of natural disasters included a unique variety of events–massive hurricanes, such as Ida, whose damages stretched from Texas to New England, tornado outbreaks, massive wildfires in the West, flooding in California and Louisiana, a massive winter storm which knocked out power to more than 4 million houses and businesses across Texas last February, killing nearly 250 people, a catastrophic heat weave in the Pacific Northwest, a region with a normally mild climate such that many homes don’t even have air conditioning, and severe wind events such as the serial derecho which hit the Midwest last December.
With respect to damages from natural disasters affecting U.S. agriculture, the amount of money paid out in crop insurance indemnities has increased at a steady rate over the last few decades, even after accounting for the increase in insured acres. According to the Summary of Business report published on the website for USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA). the five-year annual average of indemnities paid to insured farmers for 2017-2021 increased by 157 percent as compared to the first five years after the passage of the Agricultural Risk Protection Act of 2000 (ARPA) (2001-2005), from $3.17 billion to $8.15 billion, while net insured acres only increased by 73 percent over the same period. In the ARPA legislation, Congress enacted increases in the premium subsidy schedule and other changes which made the program much more attractive to farmers
There is a scientific consensus that climate change over the last few decades has definitely contributed to the surge in extreme weather events, manifesting in a variety of ways. One of the more clear-cut examples is the role of sea-level rise due to climate change in augmenting the impact of storm surges from hurricanes and tropical storms as they come ashore, which extends the reach of floodwaters further inland than would otherwise be the case. The massive flooding in the New Orleans area and neighboring coastal Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was in part a result of this phenomenon, as was the extended flood damage from Super Storm Sandy in New York and New Jersey in 2012.
Research has shown that the massive heat wave which hit Russia in 2010 was intensified by the impact of climate change. According to a 2014 article in the journal Mortality, this heat wave led to the deaths of more than 10,000 people in the region, mainly among the elderly population due to both high temperatures and air pollution due to wildfires in Siberia sparked by the heat wave.
Wildfires in the western United States have increased in both frequency and intensity in recent decades, attributable to warmer and drier weather conditions as a result of a multi-year drought caused at least in part by climate change. The seven largest wildfires in California in terms of total area affected have occurred since 2018, and in 2020, nearly 10,000 recorded wildfires burned more than 4.2 million acres, a record level for the state.
Traditionally, state and federal officials in charge of combatting Western wildfires have based their planning on the assumption that such events will occur primarily during a four-month period in late summer and fall, the so-called fire season. In recent years, many large wildfires have occurred outside of that window, such as the massive Camp Fire in northern California, which erupted in November 2018, killing 85 people.
