At a Glance

A new report from a non-partisan federal watchdog has alarming projections about climate change-impacted natural disasters.Over the past decade, the U.S. has spent $350 billion in federal money on natural disasters.These costs could rise as high as $112 billion per year by the end of the century, the report said.

Climate change is already costing the United States billions of dollars each year, according to a new report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog.

Over the last decade, the federal government has spent $350 billion on extreme weather and fire events, and climate change is expected to make those costs , the report found. That number includes the cost of disaster response and relief; crop and flood insurance; wildland fire management and maintenance and repairs to federal structures and lands impacted by extreme weather.

The non-partisan group's report was compiled aftera joint request from Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, and Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

"We cannot ignore the impact of climate change on ," Collins said in a statement. "This nonpartisan GAO report Senator Cantwell and I requested contains astonishing numbers about the consequences of climate change for our economy and for the federal budget in particular."

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Of those annual costs, the report concluded $12 billion are, on average, caused by climate change. By the middle of the century, that could increase to $35 billion per year, and by 2100, climate change-related costs could balloon as high as $112 billion.

"The new GAO report confirms that climate change is already costing taxpayers, and we can expect that cost to rise in the coming decades," said Bob Henson, weather and climate blogger at Weather Underground and author of The Thinking Person's Guide to Climate Change. "As the new report emphasizes, not all parts of the nation will be hit equally by climatechange-related costs. More and more Americans are moving toward the Sun Belt, toward coastlines, and into the forested parts of the West. These are among the very places most vulnerable to climate change impacts, from increased hurricane rainfall to longer wildfire seasons."

Specifically, the report expects elevated risks in the Southeast from rising sea levels and higher storm surge along the coast; in the Northeast, these threats will be elevated, though not as severe as the increase in the Southeast. In the Midwest and Plains, lower crop yields are expected to become the norm, and in the West, the costliest disasters will be wildfires, heat waves and drought that will continue to get more expensive.

The study was performed using a combination of climate science and economics models. According to the Associated Press, copies of the report were sent to the White House and Environmental Protection Agency ahead of its release; the Trump administration has called climate change a hoax, and the EPA from its new climate changewebsite. Neither the White House nor the EPA responded to the AP's requests for comment on the report.

"The U.S. hurricanes and fires of the last two months, together with this report, should serve as a wake-up call – and we ought not to hit the snooze button," said Henson. "The more we understand our evolving climate risks, the more we can do to create smart federal policy that will help save lives and save taxpayers money in the long run."