IE 11 Not Supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

The Economic Cost of Disasters — Macro

The data is from NOAA.

Billion-dollar events have become much more common in recent years. See the chart below which came from How Much.

They obtained the numbers from NOAA. See below: 

"We found the numbers for our visualization from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which tracks the frequency of natural disasters, their total property damage and the resulting number of deaths. The numbers represent cumulative damage from each category of natural disaster between 1980 to 2017. NOAA has its own sophisticated methodology for how it accounts for these figures. They include both insured and uninsured losses that would not have happened had such an event not taken place. Of course, there’s considerable uncertainty involved in any such counterfactual estimate, but the research is backed by career scientists and economists with a sophisticated understanding of statistics."

[Note: I think tropical cyclones should be named hurricanes. Cyclones are found in the Pacific Ocean.]

natural-disaster-costs-in-usa-230e.png


Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.