Climate change-driven flooding caused the U.S. $78B in damages in the last 30 years
In the last year alone, natural disasters in the U.S. created $22 billion in damages, NOAA reports.
New research out of Stanford University puts a price tag on the cost of climate change.
According to their report, a third of the financial damage caused by flooding in the U.S. over the past three decades can be attributed to excess precipitation caused by climate change — nearly $75 billion worth.
First published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the paper was written in a collaboration between Stanford climate scientists and economists focused on determining how much damage is due to climate change.
To do so, researchers first identified and accounted for all the other factors that may have added to flood damage, such as increased construction and population in flood-prone areas and a rise in home values.
In speaking to Bloomberg, Frances Davenport, the report’s lead author and a Ph.D. student at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences, commented on past attempts and failures to estimate the cost of damage caused by climate change.
Previous studies relied on broad measures such as average precipitation and nationwide flood damage, Davenport explained, whereas Stanford researchers looked at state-level flood damages on a month-by-month basis for “a more granular view of the impacts of extreme precipitation.”
From there, the Stanford researchers compared their findings with models estimating the contribution of climate change to specific increases in precipitation to help them arrive at the relationship between precipitation and damage.
“This counterfactual analysis is similar to computing how many games the Los Angeles Lakers would have won, with and without the addition of LeBron James, holding all other players constant,” Marshall Burke, study co-author, economist and an associate professor of Earth system science, said in a statement.
Researchers say this methodology can be used to isolate the role a changing climate plays in other weather-related disasters such as wildfires and crop failure and are hopeful the model can be used to create a better understanding of climate risk on a regional and national scale.
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