Weather disasters hit 90% of US counties in last 11 years, report finds

California, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Iowa and Tennessee suffered most disasters, with over 300m people living in those counties

Ninety percent of the counties in the US suffered a weather disaster between 2011 and 2021, according to a new report.

Some endured as many as 12 federally declared disasters over those 11 years. More than 300 million people – 93% of the population – live in these counties.

Rebuild by Design, which published the report, is a non-profit that researches ways to prepare for and adapt to climate change. It was started by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the catastrophic storm that slammed the eastern US just over 10 years ago, causing $62.5bn in damage.

Researchers had access to data from contractors who work closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), allowing them to analyze disasters and payouts down to the county level. They also looked at who is most vulnerable and compared how long people in different places are left without power after extreme weather.

California, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Iowa and Tennessee had the most disasters, at least 20 each, including severe storms, wildfire, flooding and landslides. But Louisiana, New York, New Jersey, North Dakota and Vermont received the most disaster funding per person.

Amy Chester, managing director of Rebuild by Design and co-author of the report, said she was surprised to see some states getting more money to rebuild than others. That is partly because cost of living differs among states. So does the monetary value of what gets damaged or destroyed.

“Disaster funding is oftentimes skewed toward communities that are more affluent and have the most resources,” said Robert Bullard, an environmental and climate justice professor at Texas Southern University, who was not part of the team that wrote the report.

Bullard wrote a book, The Wrong Complexion for Protection in 2012 with another environmental and climate justice expert, Beverly Wright, about how federal responses to disasters often exclude black communities.

The new report seems to support that. People who are most vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather events are not receiving much of the money, the report said. Those areas of the country also endure the longest electric outages.

“When disasters hit … funding doesn’t get to the places of greatest need,” Bullard said.

Another reason for the unevenness of funds could be that heatwaves are excluded from federal disaster law and don’t trigger government aid. If they did, states in the south-west like Arizona and Nevada might rank higher on spending per person.

Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University, said the report was prepared by policy advocates, not scientists, and oversteps in attributing every weather disaster to climate change.

Climate change has turbocharged the climate and made some hurricanes stronger and disaster more frequent, Jackson, said, adding: “I don’t think it’s appropriate to call every disaster we’ve experienced in the last 40 years a climate disaster.”

Jackson said the collection could still have value: “I do think there is a service to highlighting that weather disasters affect essentially all Americans now, no matter where we live.”

The annual costs of disasters has soared, Jackson said, to more than $100bn in 2020. The National Centers for Environmental Information tallied more than $150bn for 2021.

The federal government provided counties $91bn to recover after extreme events over the 11 years, the researchers found. That only includes spending from two programs run by Fema and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, not individual assistance or insurance payouts from the agency. Nor does it include help from other agencies like the Small Business Administration or the US army corps of engineers.

Chester said that if all these federal disaster relief programs were included, the total would be far higher. The National Centers for Environmental Information estimate more than $1tn was spent on weather and climate events between 2011 and 2021.

The report recommends the federal government shift to preventing disasters rather than waiting for events to happen. It cites the National Institute of Building Sciences which says that every dollar invested in mitigating natural disaster by building levees or doing prescribed burns saves the country $6.

“The key takeaway for us is that our government continues to invest in places that have already suffered instead of investing in the areas with the highest social and physical vulnerability,” Chester said.

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