The cost of disaster: Putting a price tag on climate change
©2012 Ann Goodman  Professor John Mutter  In this era of
apparently mounting natural disasters worldwide—many, such as
floods from hurricanes, likely related to changing weather
patterns linked to climate change—one might ask: How much do
such disasters cost? How are the costs calculated? In fact,
someone has asked—analyzing not just the cost of the event
itself, but the larger economic costs linked to build-up and
often long recovery.  “The public focus [of a disaster] is on
the moment, the trauma of the extreme event,” says John Mutter,
Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, as well as
International Public Affairs, at Columbia University’s Earth
Institute. “The economic loss focuses on that moment, too—what
was actually lost at the time.”  However, that loss to the
economy—the chain of production, consumption and everything that
goes into it—doesn’t happen in a moment, but actually begins
after, he says, “with losses that go beyond the val