Damages from US weather and climate disasters reached a new record in 2020
Smoke from two fires in Colorado and one in southern Wyoming covers the sky in Denver, Colorado, on Wednesday. September 30th, 2020. | Photo by Hyoung Chang / MediaNews Group / The Denver Post via Getty Images
The US experienced a record number of billion-dollar disasters in 2020. Twenty-two disasters cost the US a cumulative $95 billion last year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That smashes previous records set in 2011 and 2017, when 16 disasters caused at least a billion dollars of damage.
NOAA’s announcement is the latest signal that climate change is hitting the US hard in the pocketbook. It follows the release of another report by insurance company Munich Re that also tallied 2020 disaster costs and found they had nearly doubled in the US since 2019.
“Climate change plays a role in this upward trend of losses,” Ernst Rauch, Munich Re chief...
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