Stanford Study: Climate Change-Caused Floods Have Cost U.S. $75B

STANFORD, CA — Flood damage attributed to climate change over a period of three decades has cost the United States nearly $75 billion according to a Stanford study released earlier this month, Stanford News reports

The study estimates blames climate change for more than a third of the estimated $199 billion in damages caused by floods related to climate change from 1988 to 2017, the report aid.

The study was published Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jan. 11.

“The fact that extreme precipitation has been increasing and will likely increase in the future is well known, but what effect that has had on financial damages has been uncertain,” Davenport said,” said lead author Frances Davenport, a PhD student in Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

“Our analysis allows us to isolate how much of those changes in precipitation translate to changes in the cost of flooding, both now and in the future.”

Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at the Kara J Foundation Professor at Stanford Earth and senior author of the report, said the study is the first to the bring the economics and science components to the equation in a comprehensive way.

“Previous studies have analyzed pieces of this puzzle, but this is the first study to combine rigorous economic analysis of the historical relationships between climate and flooding costs with really careful extreme event analyses in both historical observations and global climate models, across the whole United States,” Diffenbaugh said.

“By bringing all those pieces together, this framework provides a novel quantification not only of how much historical changes in precipitation have contributed to the costs of flooding, but also how greenhouse gases influence the kinds of precipitation events that cause the most damaging flooding events,” Diffenbaugh added.

Read more at Stanford News