A curious trend has emerged in recent years.
Many types of natural disasters cause greater destruction as populations have grown in floodplains, wildfire zones, and hot climates. More people means more property, which is part of the reason why the number of disasters with billions of dollars in damage is increasing in the United States.
And humans are making many of these disasters worse by changing the climate. Rising average global temperatures are exacerbating heat waves and heavy rains and raising sea levels.
“Widespread, pervasive impacts on ecosystems, people, settlements and infrastructure result from observed increases in the frequency and intensity of climate and weather extremes,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote in its latest report.
But despite these rising risks, disasters around the world are becoming less deadly overall. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the number of disasters in the last 50 years has increased fivefold, but the number of deaths has decreased by two-thirds.
It’s a huge achievement—perhaps one of the greatest success stories in modern history—but it’s easy to overlook. These huge gains are the result of the steady, incremental work of forecasters, planners, architects, engineers, and politicians, not any single innovation. And the main metric is losses prevented, something that is often difficult to measure and difficult to value.
Volunteers and emergency workers help evacuate residents of a nursing home after Hurricane Florence brought flooding to North Carolina in 2018. Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images
However, some world leaders are paying attention and want to continue this progress. In particular, the United Nations and WCO are launching a $1.5 billion program to ensure that everyone on Earth is covered by a disaster early warning system over the next five years. However, the WMO did not elaborate on the details of the program and did not respond to requests for comment.
“Early warnings and action save lives,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in March. “We need to increase predictive power for everyone and build their capacity to act.”
As countries like the US look ahead to another summer of wildfires, floods and heat waves – and with the world likely to exceed climate change targets – saving lives from disasters is a top priority. The past century shows that steady progress is adding up, but we cannot take this for granted as climate change increases disaster risks and a concerted strategy to counter them will be needed.
Improved disaster prediction is a huge, underrated success
The downward trend in deaths from natural disasters is something to behold. In the early 20th century, annual deaths from disasters sometimes exceeded a million. By the 1970s, deaths had fallen to approximately 100,000 per year, and in the current decade to half or less of that number. There were a few years that bucked this trend in the last century as particularly severe disasters occurred, but the overall decline has persisted. And keep in mind that in 1900 there were only 2 billion people in the world, compared to 7.8 billion today.
Two main factors have saved lives even with increasingly dangerous disasters and a growing population: better forecasting and a greater ability to deal with storms, floods, fires and heat waves when they occur.
Disaster forecasting has seen dramatic improvements, especially in the age of weather satellites and vastly more powerful computers. For example, the National Hurricane Center can now project a hurricane’s path 72 hours in advance. In 1990, the center could make such a forecast only 24 hours before a storm, and with less accuracy. Now consider that, according to the WMO, having 24 hours of warning before a storm reduces damage by 30 percent. Two extra days of waiting time and a more precise storm track is a huge improvement that has helped get even more people out of harm’s way.
President Joe Biden delivers a briefing on Hurricane Ida in front of a map predicting the storm’s path in 2021 Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Forecasters have also extended their timing for extreme weather events such as heat waves and heavy rainfall, as well as long-term phenomena such as seasonal rainfall or expected cyclone activity in a given year. This allows officials to issue disaster warnings and prepare for other issues, such as famine.
Even in disasters that have multiple intersecting factors, namely wildfires, researchers are getting better at predicting when the next fires will break out. In the US, the National Interagency Fire Prevention Center publishes seasonal fire forecasts that can help officials deploy firefighting teams and perform preventative maintenance.
And when fires do occur, modelers can take weather, geography and vegetation into account to predict not only the flames but other associated impacts.
“If you have a decent idea of what’s going to happen in terms of how flammable a particular region is, you could use that information to develop predictions of what you’d expect in terms of something like downwind smoke impact,” Matthew said. Hurteau, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico who studies wildfires and climate.
On the other hand, unpredictable disasters are still a powerful threat. Tornadoes, for example, form and dissipate quickly and are difficult to detect with radar and satellites. Tornado research still depends on observers on the ground. So tornado warnings haven’t improved in the same way that hurricane forecasts have. According to the National Weather Service, more than half of tornado warnings are false alarms. As a result, tornadoes remain some of the deadliest weather events in the United States.
Geological disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are even more difficult to predict. However, scientists have improved their understanding of where such events will occur, and while they have times measured in minutes, parts of the world now have early warning systems for earthquakes. Better earthquake detection and warnings have also improved tsunami warning systems.
The problem is that the places in the world with the most robust disaster forecasting and warning programs are often the wealthiest regions. Between 1970 and 2019, more than 91 percent of all weather- and climate-related deaths occurred in developing countries, according to the WCO. Only half of the world’s countries have early warning systems for multiple hazards, and there are large gaps in weather and climate observations in regions such as Africa, Latin America and island nations.
So building disaster warning systems for everyone in the world in five years is a monumental task. “This is an extremely ambitious goal, but an important one,” Samantha Montano, assistant professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, said in an email.
The devastation of a disaster does not end with the storm
Despite the epochal scale and devastation of events like hurricanes and wildfires, it can be surprisingly difficult to address the full scope of their impact. One can tally up the casualties when the ground shakes, the wind blows, and the rain falls, but how many post-event deaths and injuries must be added to the tally?
And when it comes to “natural” disasters, it can be difficult to distinguish which impacts are from natural forces and which result from human causes, such as construction in high-risk areas or poor disaster response.
“Historically, indirect deaths were either not tracked at all or very poorly tracked,” Montano said.
Look at the list of the deadliest hurricanes in the US and you’ll notice that most of them were decades ago, and some were more than a century ago. However, there are a few obvious deviations. 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 storm with winds reaching 175 miles per hour, officially killed about 1,800 people. Hurricane Maria in 2017, also a Category 5, killed more than 3,000 people. But the true toll of these disasters was probably much greater.
Power outages in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017 lasted for months, adding to the disaster’s death toll. Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
While the storms themselves were extremely severe, both hurricanes had long tails of destruction. Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent collapse of levees in New Orleans led to flooding and road closures that lasted more than 40 days. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico suffered the largest blackout in US history, leaving residents without power for vital medical devices, refrigerators and lighting for months.
Warnings may have helped some people avoid the harsh elements of the storms, but much of the devastation from these disasters came in their wake, stemming from failures to prepare and respond.
“The theory is that with better warnings you should see a reduction [in deaths]and in many cases we do. But then you factor in the socioeconomic factor, and even with warnings you can have very high fatalities,” said Craig Fugate, who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under President Barack Obama.
Disaster warnings do not eliminate the events themselves, and there are large differences in who is equipped to evacuate before a disaster and who has the resources to resume their lives after it.
For example, in the US, the heat…
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