Who should pay when disaster strikes?
Last month, Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica and surrounding islands and broke records for the strongest Atlantic hurricane to hit land. Deadly heatwaves in Europe, floods in Pakistan, and fires in Southern California, and other extreme weather events this year offer a stark preview of our climate future. Catastrophic disasters and extreme weather are becoming more common and more severe every year as climate change fuels extreme conditions. This climate reality is propelling the growth of an industry dedicated to disaster relief and preparedness, a clear market response to an escalating crisis.
In July, we reported on the ways fossil fuel polluters impede and delay climate progress and how they make us pay the price. Now, costs from disaster recovery, insurance premiums, power outages, and more cover about 3% of US GDP, or around $1 trillion dollars. The share of GDP spent on disaster preparedness and relief is growing. New research is showing that even more corporate actors are benefitting from the severe weather brought on by climate change.
Research on the disaster industry finds the sector is booming. Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Analyst Andrew John Stevenson collated about 100 large public companies called the Prepare and Repair Index. The companies covered sectors like industrial materials, utilities, manufacturing, waste, and insurance brokers that deal in disasters and severe weather. Stevenson found that together the companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 6.5% a year between October 2015 to October 2025.
The Trump administration has promised to phase out FEMA and move the responsibility for preparing and recovering from disasters to state and local governments. The move shifts the burden of disaster readiness onto smaller jurisdictions that cannot afford it and will be forced to make hard choices with high priority items like education and healthcare. Similarly, these state and local governments are not equipped to be able to respond as effectively as the federal government – the result could be less support and more financial burden on the very communities facing extreme weather disasters.
Bloomberg reported that an executive from an engineering firm justified the growth of the disaster-industrial complex in a recent earnings call, saying that defending people and property from hazards wasn’t a partisan issue. But the growth of the disaster relief industry is a symptom of a deeper failure: the retreat of public safeguards and the unchecked escalation of the climate crisis.
We cannot accept a future where safety from climate disasters and extreme weather is a for-profit commodity. Polluters who fuel the climate crisis need to be footing the bill to clean up the mess they are creating.
It’s time for corporations who continue to worsen extreme weather and disasters are held accountable. Take action and tell governments worldwide that the people should not be paying the bill for climate disasters: sign the Polluters Pay Pact today.
