Extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy can cost lives and billions of dollars in damages.
A side effect of America’s growth has been the tendency to put more people, infrastructure and assets in harm’s way, and when a storm comes through, that increased exposure drives up economic losses,” said author Benjamin Preston, deputy director of ORNL’s Climate Change Science Institute, who studied historical data from more than 3,000 U.S. counties and used predictive modeling in the assessment.
Preston projected that current annual U.S. disaster losses of $10 billion to $13 billion could increase by a factor of 1.8 to 3.9 by 2050. Read the Full Story.
