Hi Josh, I thought one of our experts was going to respond to you, but it's been a scramble for them trying to get caught up from the government shut down, so they must not have yet had time. My take is that if the point of these annual billion dollar disaster reports was to explain the causes of weather and climate disasters, then of course, they would have to do much more involved land cover/urbanization and population/social analyses in order to say anything meaningful about that.

But the purpose of these reports is simply to provide a tally of the number and annual costs of the country’s most significant disasters using a methodology that is consistent enough for us to be able to compare one year with another. So, if they were trying to attribute the definitive cause of an observed increase in the cost of BDD in a given location, then yes, it would certainly matter whether a given area had urbanized or not. But for basic score-keeping, that wouldn’t matter: a billion dollars in damage is a billion dollars in damage no matter what the land cover is.