WASWAC

Wind erosion and resulting dust negatively impact the environment and society, but there has been no comprehensive assessment of costs to the United States since the 1990s. Climate and society have changed greatly since then, including changing dustiness, spiking Valley fever infections and increased renewable energy use. By adopting published estimates and calculating emerging costs, we estimate that wind erosion and dust in the United States cost $154.4 billion annually (2017 value). This estimate quadruples the previous assessment and is higher than most other US weather and climate disasters. We also discovered many costs associated with wind erosion that are not accounted for. Our estimate, while conservative, reveals that the economic burden of wind erosion is substantial and investment in dust mitigation could yield large economic benefits.

As the Earth warms and droughts become the new normal, extreme events, such as dust storms, impose increasingly profound health and safety burdens on society. In the history of North America, dust storms are one of the most powerful and dramatic ways through which climate change affects society and the environment. In the 1930s, the United States experienced an environmental catastrophe known as the ‘Dust Bowl’, which was characterized by extended drought, high winds, an economic depression, poor land management and numerous large dust storms. These storms stripped topsoil from farms, buried houses and forced millions of farmers to abandon their homes to migrate to cities and the West Coast. Today, a warming climate, declining water resources and the spread of invasive species that promote bare ground, suggest that parts of the United States could become dustier in the coming decades.