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Looking Back & Thinking Forward

2024 End-of-Year Weather Resilience Report

In 2024, severe weather disrupted...

  • 86% of governments
    95+ surveyed
  • 83% of businesses
    160+ surveyed
  • 72% of individuals
    1,300+ surveyed

There’s a growing need to understand not just how weather impacts a place but how it affects a community – a collection of inextricably interconnected stakeholders who all experience things slightly different and have their own drivers. 

To help facilitate that conversation, AEM conducted a survey during the autumn of 2024 to profile severe weather’s impact throughout the year and benchmark what various community stakeholders are anticipating in 2025.

Top regional weather challenges in 2024

Given that weather is largely a regional challenge, the survey sought to profile the most commonly felt severe weather and environmental events for each region. The numbers below indicate the percentage of regional respondents affected by that kind of weather or disaster. What you see is just a "Top 3" preview -- the full report digs much deeper!

Quantifying weather's impact in 2024

We dove deep into the results from our survey to illustrate how severe weather impacts both the public and private sectors... and learned both sides are feeling the pain in similar ways.

2024WeatherImpacts

Key finding: We need better public-private collaboration

Collaboration between government and business on weather is essential because everybody feels the pain and nobody is funded to address the entire event cycle for every conceivable type of event.

When area government and business entities rally around those shared challenges, there’s also the opportunity to rally budget around solutions that would improve regional weather resilience. Those funds can be collectively invested in technologies that improve forecasting, awareness, and alerting to maximize preparation time, reduce impacts, and accelerate a swift recovery in the face of severe weather events.

That work simply isn’t happening in many places around the United States and world, as the numbers from AEM’s 2024 survey illustrate:

Collaboration_Rates

Moving through those statistics from left to right, it’s clear that there’s a bit of a wall up between these potential collaborative 
stakeholders. Just under one-in-five local governments and agencies is comfortable with peer collaboration, and almost none 
them are actively engaged with the business community. That was mirrored and amplified from the business community’s 
side, where businesses are actually more likely to be collaborating with each other than with their local governments on what is 
basically a public safety and economic continuity issue

That lack of collaboration translates to both frosty relationships and bad coordination when the stakes are highest, and unless 
something changes, it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. That’s why it’s so important to get real collaboration started.

We were so inspired and concerned by these findings that we wrote a companion white paper on how local governments can get meaningful collaboration with the business communities they serve off the ground.

Thinking forward: Weather concerns for 2025

The survey sought to profile how people are feeling about severe weather headed into 2025 and how much they're budgeting for weather resilience.

Compared to a year ago, are you more concerned, less concerned, or at the same level of concern regarding severe weather’s potential impact?

The data shows that stakeholders across the community appreciate that the challenge of severe weather isn’t going anywhere soon.

In spite of that, when we asked how much money respondents had budgeted for weather resilience in 2025, the most common response among all three groups was ZERO!

2025 Weather Resilience Budgets-v4
While governments and businesses obviously command much larger budgets than individual households, the survey uncovered that everyday people might actually be budgeting more at scale than the bigger entities. Individuals are 20% more likely to have money set aside for weather than the governments that represent and serve them, and private citizens were the most likely to report having a budget in one of the two largest categories by a substantial margin.

Get your copy of the full weather resilience report

The statistics and infographics above are just a preview of the incredible variety of data stories inside our end-of-year report!

The full version contains deeper insights and more actionable takeaways, including:

  • More data on regional challenges and impacts - what's doing damage where, and how much is it costing people?
  • Deeper dives into each response group: governments, businesses, and individuals
  • Top weather resilience strategies from 2024
  • Recommendations for increasing weather readiness and collaboration
  • Weather expectations and budget breakdowns for 2025