Wind erosion and dust may be invisible hazards, but in the United States, they have an eye-popping $154 billion annual price tag, according to the first comprehensive cost assessment in 3 decades. On the basis of 2017 data, the best available for the contributing factors assessed, the total is 4 times greater than the 1995 estimate.
When compared to other billion-dollar disasters in 2017, dust’s cost was second only to tropical cyclones. That year saw an unusually active storm season with six major hurricanes, including Harvey and Maria.
Researchers extracted data from agencies including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, NOAA, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as metrics from academic studies, to tally estimated costs, including lost agricultural productivity, dust-related traffic accidents, and mortality rates resulting from inhaled airborne particulates.
Roughly 13,000 premature deaths from respiratory or cardiovascular disease totaled $97.5 billion, making mortality the priciest consequence of windblown dust. That figure comes from applying the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 2020 value for a human life: $7.5 million.
New health concerns have emerged in recent decades, notably the growing prevalence of a respiratory infection known as valley fever, caused by fungal spores carried on dust. Around 14,000 cases of valley fever were reported in the southwestern United States in 2017, adding up to almost $3 billion.
Over the past 30 years, societal changes have caused dust to affect the economy in new ways.
“The study findings reinforce what people in my field already know—that health impacts tend to be most important of all the ways that disasters can impact the economy,” said James Crooks, a climate epidemiologist at National Jewish Health hospital in Denver, Colo., who was not involved with the study.
Over the past 30 years, societal changes have caused dust to affect the economy in new ways. Windblown dust settles on solar panels, limiting their output, and clogs wind energy sources at a cost of roughly $4 billion.
Persistent drought in the West has also created costly dust hot spots, notably disappearing inland lakes such as California’s Salton Sea and Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Controlling dust from newly exposed playas in these locations may cost around $2 billion annually at the Great Salt Lake and at least $2.2 billion at the Salton Sea.
Wind erosion from agricultural land has stabilized or decreased since the last assessment. Agricultural losses from wind erosion are, at $10 billion, still considerable but almost half of 1995 estimates.
Dust mitigation spending on agricultural lands, such as subsidies for planting cover crops or hedgerows, is low by comparison. “The combined spending from federal and state governments is less than 1% of the economic cost,” said study coauthor Daniel Tong, an atmospheric scientist at George Mason University.
Conservative Estimate
Though the researchers considered a wide range of costs associated with dust, the annual estimate is undoubtedly conservative, according to the authors. “There are many other categories that we did not include, just because we did not have reliable numbers,” said study coauthor Thomas Gill, an environmental scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso. There are no good estimates of losses in the ski industry when dust shortens the ski season as a result of earlier snowmelt, for example.
Study coauthor Irene Feng, a graduate student at George Mason University who conducted the analysis, also had no way to quantify dust’s broader ecosystem impacts. “We simply don’t know if more plants or animals are dying,” she said.
“[Scientists] really need to put the resources towards monitoring to characterize dust events better.”
Limited data hinder scientists’ ability to assess the full range of dust’s impacts. For example, the Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) network, which tracks haze in 160 locations, including many near remote national parks, samples only every 3 days but provides the best data available for inferring dust measures, explained Jenny Hand, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who was not involved in the study.
“[Scientists] really need to put the resources towards monitoring to characterize dust events better,” she noted.
—Virginia Gewin (@virginiagewin.bsky.social), Science Writer