(Radio Iowa) – While 2025 wasn’t an especially terrible year for natural disasters in Iowa, a new report finds it was one of the most expensive years nationwide, with 23 major weather-related incidents that cost more than a billion dollars each. University of Iowa finance professor Martin Grace, an expert on risk management, says new home construction has to meet the latest codes, but Iowans living in older homes may find themselves facing expensive upgrades in the years to come. “Most homeowners who have older houses are going to have to make their houses resilient,” Grace says, “and you don’t remodel your house every seven years, or you don’t remodel your house maybe once in your in your lifetime of owning a house.”

In 2024, northwest Iowa saw historic flooding, while the entire state was raked by a record 125 tornadoes. The multi-state derecho wind storm in 2020 destroyed some seven-million Iowa trees and overall cost more than 11-billion dollars, the bulk of it in Iowa to houses, businesses and crops. Grace, a past president of the American Risk & Insurance Association, says climate change predictions call for these severe weather events to worsen and become more frequent. Iowa homeowners, he says, will have to act to make their homes more durable. “I think over time, what’s going to happen is that we’re going to remodel houses to have more resilient roofs,” Grace says. “We’re going to have property that is going to be a little bit more flood tolerant. We’re going to do other things that the homeowner is going to have to essentially manage to reduce the risk.”

While Iowa is in middle of what’s considered the nation’s tornado alley, other states face significant threats from both tornadoes and hurricanes, like Alabama. “With the industry’s help, they have formed a program that helps people make their homes more resilient,” Grace says. “I think this is the next transition for homes and buildings around the country, especially in wind and cyclonic areas where we have tornadoes and hail. This is going to be a more important thing in the future, but it doesn’t happen overnight.”

Even though no hurricanes made landfall in the U-S last year, for the first time in a decade, the study from Climate Central found weather-related disasters in 2025 nationwide cost more than 115-billion dollars, led by the Los Angeles wildfires.

https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/2025-in-review