Climate Disasters on Campuses More Frequent, Severe in 21st Century

Hurricane Helene stirred fresh climate anxiety for some college students in western North Carolina earlier this year, pushing them into a growing cohort of young people who are worried about the future of the environment.

While rebounding after climate-related disasters, such as hurricanes and wildfires, is a century-old problem for college campuses, college students’ awareness and anxiety about climate change is a relatively newly documented issue.  

It’s happening alongside colleges dealing with the effects of the increased frequency and cost of climate disasters in recent decades, according to the report “Learning Through Dev­as­ta­tion: The Worst Campus Natural Disasters,” which the rankings and review aggregator College Consensus published earlier this month.

“With global climate change, natural disasters are becoming an unavoidable reality for colleges and universities in the U.S. and around the world,” the report said. “Whether it’s hurricanes, wildfires, floods, or earthquakes, these events don’t just disrupt day-to-day campus life—they can also threaten the academic and financial stability of institutions for years to come.”

On its list of the eight “worst college natural disasters,” which dates back to the Great Earthquake that caused $50 million (adjusted for inflation) in damage to Stanford University in 1906, four have occurred over the past 20 years. Those include:

• $650 million in damages Hurricane Katrina dealt Tulane University in 2005; 
• $750 million in damages the University of Iowa sustained after the Iowa River Flood in 2008; 
• $120 million in losses the University of North Carolina at Wilmington suffered after Hurricane Florence in 2018; and
• Although the campuses were spared from much of the 2018 Camp Fire’s destruction, hundreds of students, staff, and faculty at California State University, Chico, and nearby Butte College lost their homes as a result of the fire.

And only one 20th-century climate-related disaster—the 1906 earthquake—ranked among the most costly.