Planning and decision-making can be improved by access to reliable forecasts of ecosystem state, ecosystem services, and natural capital. Availability of new data sets, together with progress in computation and statistics, will increase our ability to forecast ecosystem change. An agenda that would lead toward a capacity to produce, evaluate, and communicate forecasts of critical ecosystem services requires a process that engages scientists and decision-makers. Interdisciplinary linkages are necessary because of the climate and societal controls on ecosystems, the feedbacks involving social change, and the decision-making relevance of forecasts.

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This paper reviews recent work on trends during this century in societal impacts (direct economic losses and fatalities) in the United States from extreme weather conditions and compares those with trends of associated atmospheric phenomena. Most measures of the economic impacts of weather and climate extremes over the past several decades reveal increasing losses. But trends in most related weather and climate extremes do not show comparable increases with time. This suggests that increasing losses are primarily due to increasing vulnerability arising from a variety of societal changes, including a growing population in higher risk coastal areas and large cities, more property subject to damage, and lifestyle and demographic changes subjecting lives and property to greater exposure. Flood damages and fatalities have generally increased in the last 25 years. While some have speculated that this may be due in part to a corresponding increase in the frequency of heavy rain events, the climate contribution to the observed impacts trends remains to be quantified. There has been a steady increase in hurricane losses. However, when changes in population, inflation, and wealth are considered, there is instead a downward trend. This is consistent with observations of trends in hurricane frequency and intensity. Increasing property losses due to thunderstorm-related phenomena (winds, hail, tornadoes) are explained entirely by changes in societal factors, consistent with the observed trends in the thunderstorm phenomena. Winter storm damages have increased in the last 10-15 years and this appears to be partially due to increases in the frequency of intense nor'easters. There is no evidence of changes in drought-related losses (although data are poor) and no apparent trend in climatic drought frequency. There is also no evidence of changes in the frequency of intense heat or cold waves.

Recalling the objective and principles of, and the commitments under, the Convention, Acknowledging the importance of addressing climate change and its adverse effects in the context of sustainable development, Pledging to take further action in the wisdom that the adverse effects of climate change are likely to grow in the future and that developing countries are the most vulnerable and the least able to adapt,

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A normalization estimates damage from an historical extreme event were that same event to occur under contemporary societal conditions. This paper provides a major update the leading dataset on normalized US hurricane losses in the continental United States from 1900 to 2017. Over this period, hurricanes caused $1.9 trillion in normalized (2017) damage, or just over $16.1 billion annually.Landfalling hurricanes in the continental United States (CONUS) are responsible for more than 2/3 of global catastrophe losses since 1980, according to data from Munich Re, a global reinsurance company. 1 The management of economic risks associated with hurricanes largely relies on "catastrophe models" which estimate losses from modeled storms in the context of contemporary data on exposure and vulnerability. 2,3 As a complement to such model-based approaches, an empirical approach to hurricane risk estimation has been employed since 1998, called "normalization." 4,5 A normalization estimates damage of an historical extreme event were it to occur under contemporary societal conditions. Normalization methodologies are widely

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