Earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season could rank “among the busiest on record,” as climate change continues to cause more extreme weather events. With the number of extreme weather events caused by warming ocean temperatures and other manifestations of climate change continuing to increase, so are costs—in some cases exponentially.
There is growing consensus among government agencies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) and industry groups like the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) that communities and federal disaster recovery agencies must consider the compounding effects of disasters—weather-related or not—and to quantify the costs associated with returning critical infrastructure and buildings to functionality after the disaster occurs.
Most existing building codes currently are focused on preventing loss of life, not functionality, says Maria Lehman, past president of ASCE and vice chair of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council.
At a time when historic levels of federal funding are flowing for new infrastructure projects, decision-makers should take care to use that funding wisely, says Aspasia “Sissy” Nikolaou, NIST’s earthquake engineering group leader for the agency’s Materials and Structural Systems Division.
As of August 8, 19 climate- or weather-related disasters with damages exceeding $1 billion have occurred in the U.S. this year. That’s in line with the significant uptick in disasters over the past five years, but between 1983 and 2023 there was only an average of eight events annually, according to NOAA calculations.
A recent analysis by the National Academies examined the costs associated with successive billion-dollar storms in the Gulf of Mexico between 2020 and 2021. The storms occurred while the communities were still grappling with deaths, materials supply shortages and other vulnerabilities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. During the time period studied, communities were barely able to recover from one disaster before being confronted with another at the same time they were reeling from the impacts of the pandemic.
“This constellation of sequential, sudden-onset disasters imposed compounding stress on a region with multi-faceted and persistent socio-economic and socio-environmental disparities,” the report concluded.
For example, when Category-4 Hurricane Delta hit land in October 2020, the community of Cameron Parish in Louisiana was still repairing roofs and infrastructure damaged by Hurricane Laura five weeks earlier. Less than five months later, Winter Storm Uri froze the tarps on roofs that had been unable to be repaired after the previous storms, and pipes froze, causing many households to lose access to clean water.
“I think that we have a big challenge, which is we have the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, so we have money, but if the money is not invested wisely, then we are going to have the same issues,” NIST’s Nikolaou says. “To me, it’s important to know what questions to ask” in making decisions about infrastructure investments rather than thinking there is one "optimal" approach, she says, which could result in not getting to the root of a potential problem in some areas.
Part of understanding how and where to invest requires accurate data about the true costs—not just to replace damaged infrastructure, but all of the costs, which can include things like the economic ramifications of time lost from work, hospitalizations or lost revenue from toll roads if those roads are inaccessible, adds Lehman, who is also U.S. infrastructure lead for global professional services firm GHD.
Efforts are underway to quantify true costs in a more holistic way, at NIST, the World Bank and elsewhere.
Lehman points to a recent GHD study that found that there is widespread—though uneven—support for addressing climate change and reducing carbon emissions in several countries across generations. A total of 13,000 people of varying ages were surveyed in communities across the globe, including 4,000 people in the U.S.
“If it makes so much more sense to build in resilience at the beginning of the project or the series of projects, why aren’t we doing that?” asks Lehman.
