Bullseye of Extreme Weather Events Expanding in America

by Henry Barbaro

As America’s hurricane season winds down, it is clear that property damages from coastal storms have been steadily increasing over recent decades, and 2024 was no exception. It is estimated that damages from hurricanes Helene and Milton will likely exceed $50 billion each.

“The economic losses are going up because we’re putting more infrastructure and housing in harm’s way,” said University of South Carolina’s Susan Cutter, co-director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute. More people living in coastal areas, along with more buildings and roads to provide shelter and access, make hurricanes more costly and destructive.

According to Stephen Strader, a professor at Villanova University who studies how human environments are vulnerable to natural disasters, America’s unsustainable population growth along its coastlines is analogous to an “expanding bullseye effect.” This is especially true for hurricane-prone Florida.  Imagine an archer taking aim at a target. If the bullseye is very small, the odds of the archer hitting it are low. But as the target grows, the archer’s odds improve. Using this metaphor, the arrows represent extreme events like hurricanes (as well as tornadoes, floods, wildfires, and droughts), and the targets are our expanding urban areas.

As is typical after natural disasters, there’s talk of re-building, employing grander “resiliency” measures.  But what kind of dystopian future awaits Florida, and the rest of coastal America? Massive tax-funded projects — houses on stilts, ubiquitous pump stations, elevated highways snaking through residential neighborhoods, enormous sea walls – each with their own social and environmental costs? These extraordinary measures will represent yet another way of doubling-down on America’s unsustainable “infinite growth” paradigm.

Population growth is a critical concern for hazard-prone states like Florida. Federal immigration policies have been responsible for much of the population growth in Florida, and throughout America. The Census Bureau projects that the U.S. population will grow by 50 million people by the Year 2060, with roughly 90 percent of that growth resulting from immigration.

How will America’s unsustainable population growth affect hazard-prone states like Florida? Unless we change course, Congress’s dysfunctional immigration policies will continue to bear more environmental damages and human suffering.