90% of the counties in the United States suffered a meteorological catastrophe between 2011 and 2021, according to a report published this Wednesday.
In those 11 years, some added up to 12 crises classified as disasters by the federal government. More than 300 million people, 93% of the country’s population, live in those counties.
Rebuild by Design, which published the report, is a nonprofit organization that researches ways to prepare for and adapt to climate change. It was created by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) after Hurricane Sandy, a storm that just over 10 years ago caused $62.5 billion in damage to the eastern United States.
The researchers had access to data from contractors who work closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which allowed them to analyze disasters and compensation by county. The report includes some 250 maps.
They also looked at who is most vulnerable and compared how long people in different places are without power after extreme weather events.
California, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Iowa and Tennessee had the highest number of disasters, at least 20 each, with various storms, fires, floods and mudslides. But over the 11-year period, entirely different states—Louisiana, New York, New Jersey, North Dakota, and Vermont—received more funding per person for catastrophe relief.
Amy Chester, Managing Director of Rebuild by Design and a co-author of the report, expressed surprise that some states received more money than others to rebuild. The difference is partly due to the fact that the cost of living is different in the states, and the monetary value of what is damaged or destroyed.
“Sometimes disaster funding is skewed toward more affluent and resourceful communities,” explained Robert Bullard, a professor of environment and climate justice at Texas Southern University, who was not involved in the report.
Bullard wrote a book in 2012 with another environmental and climate justice expert, Bevertly Wright, about how the federal response to disasters often excludes Black communities.
The new report seemed to validate it: The people most vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather events don’t get much of the money. Those parts of the country also experience the longest power outages.
“When disasters hit…funding doesn’t get to the places of greatest need,” Bullard said.
Another reason for the funding gap could be that heat waves are not included in federal disaster law and do not unlock government aid. If they did, Southwestern states like Arizona and Nevada could gain places in the per-person spending charts.
Report Overreach
The report was produced by activists, not scientists, and goes too far in attributing all weather disasters to climate change. That is inaccurate.
Climate change has made some hurricanes stronger and catastrophes more frequent, said Rob Jackson, a climate expert at Stanford University. However, he noted that he does not believe “it is appropriate to describe every disaster we have suffered in the last 40 years as a climate disaster.”
Although not all recorded weather catastrophes can be attributed to climate change, Jackson noted that the collection continues to have value.
“I do think it helps to point out that in practice, weather disasters already affect all Americans, no matter where they live,” he said.
The annual costs of disasters have skyrocketed to more than $100 billion by 2020, he said. The National Centers for Environmental Information accounted for more than $150 billion in 2021.
policy change
The federal government gave counties a total of $91 billion to recover after extreme events during those 11 years, according to the researchers.
That only includes spending from two FEMA and HUD programs, not individual aid or insurance payments through the agency. Nor does it include aid from other government entities such as the Federal Agency for the Development of Small Businesses in the United States (SBA) or the Military Corps of Engineers.
The total would be much higher if all those federal aid programs were taken into account, Chester said. The National Centers for Environmental Information estimate that between 2011 and 2021, $1 trillion dollars was spent on climate and weather events.
The report recommends that the federal government focus on preventing disasters rather than waiting for them to happen. Every dollar invested in mitigating the effects of natural disasters, for example in the construction of levees or preventive burning, saves the country six dollars, according to an estimate by the National Institute of Building Sciences cited by the report.
“The main takeaway for us is that our government continues to invest in places that have already suffered rather than investing in areas that are more physically and socially vulnerable,” Chester said.
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