"Disasters costing at least $1bn killed 474 people last year, government figures show".
"The US endured a particularly painful year as communities wrestled with the growing impacts of the climate crisis, with 18 major disasters wreaking havoc across the country as planet-heating emissions continued to climb.
Storms, floods, wildfires and droughts caused a total of $165bn in damages in the US last year, $10bn more than the 2021 total and the third most costly year since records of major losses began in 1980, according to new US government data.
With 18 disasters costing at least $1bn in damages, 2022 was only marginally behind 2020 and 2021 in terms of the number of severe events. A total of 474 people died last year from these major calamities, the annual report found.
Last year was “part of a trend of hyperactive disaster years across the US”, said Adam Smith, an applied climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), which released the data. Since 2016, there have been 122 separate billion-dollar weather and climate events that have, in total, killed more than 5,000 people and caused more than $1tn in damages."
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