Extreme weather events can have a devastating human toll, and they can also cause damage that costs billions of dollars to repair. In the last five years alone, climate disasters have cost the US a total of $595.5 billion, or an average of roughly $119 billion a year.
Some states are at higher risk of billion-dollar climate disasters than others. To find out which are most vulnerable, Forbes Advisor used National Centers for Environmental Information data from the past ten years to rank each US state according to risk.
Key Findings:
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Of all the states, Texas is most prone to billion-dollar climate disasters, followed by Illinois, Missouri, Virginia and Georgia.
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Of the top ten states facing the highest risk, eight are located in the South: Texas, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina.
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Half of the country's least vulnerable states are on the East Coast: Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Delaware and Rhode Island.
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The only state that didn't suffer a billion-dollar natural disaster between 2012 and 2022 is Hawaii.
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Of all the weather disasters in the US over the last decade, severe storms caused the highest number of billion-dollar events, with 99 recorded. Next on the list is tropical cyclones (24), followed by flooding (17), droughts (10) and wildfires (9).
Check out which areas are at most risk on the county level here.
Via Forbes Advisor.
[Image credit: Picryl]
