Understanding what hazards cost the nation in lives, dollars, impacts to long-term health, as well as impacts to natural and cultural resources helps us:
- Communicate the cumulative costs of these hazards
- Inform national and regional planning efforts
- Determine where to focus risk-related efforts and resources
USGS Office of Risk and Resilience (ORR) is working with partners to better understand the cost of hazard events to the many publics that we serve. We seek to gather information related to hazard loss that goes beyond just lives and dollars by also considering longer-term and/or disproportionate impacts to different communities.
Disaster loss reporting
Collecting and reporting information on the costs of hazard impacts is not straightforward. These data are rarely collected in a standardized format. Because response and recovery activities mostly occur at local, county, or state levels, these data are collected inconsistently across the country, and these entities have little incentive to report their information up to the Federal government. For more on these challenges, and opportunities for disaster loss reporting in the United States, please see Challenges and opportunities for Sendai framework disaster loss reporting in the United States, a paper led by ORR authors in collaboration with the Science for Disaster Reduction Interagency Working Group (SDR).
USGS is working to overcome these challenges by working with Federal agency partners, as well as state, Tribal, territorial, and local partners. The USGS approach to disaster loss data collection is informed by agency partners (such as National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Project) and by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030. The Sendai Framework Monitor creates a consistent structure to report disaster loss data over time across the globe. This consistent reporting structure aids in understanding disaster loss trends at a national and global level. ORR has worked with interagency partners in the SDR to develop an annual reporting protocol for disaster loss across the United States.
Visit the Progress of Global Targets Sendai Monitor to see how the indicator data provided by the U.S. is tracked relative to the seven targets to achieve by 2030.
