climate-2019-scientifictracks-abstracts

1 / 8

conferenceseries LLC Ltd
Find More Information @ April 2019 Conference Series LLC Ltd 19
6th World Congress on
Climate Change and Global Warming
April 24-25, 2019 | Vancouver, Canada
JOURNAL OF EARTH SCIENCE & CLIMATIC CHANGE, 2019 VOLUME 10 | DOI: 10.4172/2157-7617-C1-056 SCIENTIFIC TRACK| DAY 1
United State billion dollar
weather and climate
disasters: The increasing
cost of extreme events in
context
Adam B Smith
National Centers for
Environmental Information, USA
Since 1980, the United States
has been affected over 230
separate weather and climate
disasters, in which damage
costs exceeded $1billion each.
The cumulative cost for these
events exceeds $1.5trillion
(U.S. dollars). There have been
an increasing number of these
events causing significant
damage in recent years. From
1980–2017, the annual average
number of billion-dollar events
is 5.9 (inflation-adjusted)
while the most recent 5year
(2013–2017) annual average is
11.6 events (inflation-adjusted).
The increase in population and
material wealth over the last
several decades are an important
factor for the increased damage
potential. These trends are
further complicated by the fact
that many population centers
and infrastructure exist in
vulnerable areas like coasts and
river floodplains, while building
codes are often insufficient in
reducing damage from extreme
events. Climate change is also
playing an increasing role in
the increasing frequency of
some types of extreme weather
that lead to billion-dollar
disasters. Most notably the
rise in vulnerability to drought,
lengthening wildfire seasons
and the potential for extremely
heavy rainfall and inland flooding
events are most acutely related
to the influence of climate
change. During 2017, the U.S.
experienced a historic year of
weather and climate disasters.
In total, the U.S. was impacted
by 16 separate billion-dollar
disaster events including three
tropical cyclones, eight severe
storms, two inland floods, a crop
freeze, drought and wildfire.
More notably than the high
frequency of these events is the
cumulative cost, which exceeded
$300billion in 2017: A new U.S.
annual record. This shattered
the previous U.S. annual record
cost of $214.8billion (inflation-
adjusted). The damage from
Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and
Maria were responsible for
approximately $265.0billion
of the $306.2billion while the
California wildfire damage of
2017 ($18.0billion) tripled the
previous U.S. wildfire cost annual
record.
Biography
Adam Smith is NOAA’s leading expert on
disaster costs for the United States. Smith
has expertise to homogenize and transition
disparate disaster data sources into better
quality-controlled disaster cost frameworks,
as research tools and has expertise in
developing methods to quantify natural
disaster costs and uncertainty: https://
www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions. He sits on the
U.S. Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction,
is a NOAA expert on U.S. disaster loss data
in support of the international Sendai
Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction
(2016-Present) and is part of the Integrated
Research on Disaster Risk interdisciplinary
working group on Natural Disaster Risk/
Loss Data integration (2012–2015) and the
American Meteorological Society Committee
on Financial Weather/Climate Risk
Management (2015–2017).