Prevent, don’t react, to climate danger — shift your mindset
If accelerating floods and storms worldwide were freak events, a purely reactive crisisresponse would be justified. But because this change is the predictable outcome of human activity, proactive prevention is now the only lasting response to weather disasters.
Scientific evidence is clear about the human hand in global warming aggravating these events. Although many of us are finally making the connection, climate change is nevertheless still seen as something over the horizon. Unless this mindset changes, action to mitigate weather disasters will continue to trail behind a very dangerous reality.
Climate scientists are wary about linking a single event to climate change. There is near unanimity, however, that rising carbon emissions are causing warmer temperatures and an atmosphere packing more energy and moisture — and the link between this and the sharp rise in the frequency and ferocity of weather disasters is unmistakable. Warmer seas and more heat and water in the air are high octane to wind speeds and precipitation, as the storms and floods that have just hit Florida and Houston demonstrated with terrifying effect.
The 50 inches of rainfall during Hurricane Harvey or wind speeds of 150 miles per hour during Hurricane Irma broke records. Some cautiously worded studies are beginning to attribute the higher chances of such extremes to climate change, and are citing 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and heatwaves across the world in 2013. By some measures, the human contribution in such extreme hazards could be up to 30 percent of the rainfall.
The increasing weight of evidence on climate change will probably not move the naysayers. When this affects policy, as it does in the U.S., there is still opportunity for society and local government to make a difference — and some states and cities plan to do this. For most of us, the shift to low-carbon economies is a fait accompli: The question is how and how quickly. Cutting back on carbon emissions calls for technological breakthroughs for cleaner and more-efficient energy, but getting this adopted widely by households, agriculture and industry will require bold government policies and the backing of the private sector.
The Paris climate agreement, albeit modest in scope, is an essential step for the world to value cleaner air. And the biggest emitters — China, the U.S., India, the European Union, Japan and Russia — must deliver far more than the Paris goals.
As more people live in harm’s way in wealthy and poor countries, the human hand in weather disasters goes beyond the climate impact. Hurricane Harvey exposed Houston’s poor land-use planning and inadequate restrictions on land use. Hurricanes Irma, Harvey, Sandy and Katrina should be the point of departure to start a meaningful discussion in the U.S. on safe distances to live from coastlines, especially along the low-lying areas. Seven of the 10 U.S. states considered highly vulnerable to floods and storms, from Massachusetts to Florida, are heavily populated and lie along the low-lying, northeastern coast line. The current norms for safe distances are clearly no longer acceptable.
In developing countries, chaotic urbanization has seen settlements take hold in flood-prone areas, and these will be difficult to uproot. The poor typically settle in these areas, but they are the least able to get back on their feet after a disaster strikes.
The payoffs can be huge when preventive measures are put in place.
Japan has invested in increasing the capabilities of weather services and providing a network of disaster-proof shelters, and these are proving to be life savers.
The entire population of the small Philippine island of Tulang Diyot was saved from Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest recorded storm to make landfall, because of mandatory evacuations; elsewhere Haiyan claimed several thousand lives.
At the end of the day, it matters a lot whether these disasters are viewed as one-off events or as predictable hazards whose underlying causes can — with sufficient investment, technological know-how and political will — be dealt with.
Nobody regards epidemics as acts of God anymore; the same should hold for weather disasters.