Many types of natural disasters cause more destruction as populations have increased in flood plains, fire zones, and warm climates. More people means more property, which is part of why the number of disasters with a billion-dollar damage toll is increasing in the United States. And humans are making many of these disasters more severe by changing the climate. Rising average global temperatures are exacerbating heat waves and torrential rainfall and raising sea levels. “Widespread, pervasive impacts on ecosystems, people, settlements and infrastructure have resulted from observed increases in the frequency and intensity of climate and weather extremes,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote in its most recent report. However, despite these increasing risks, around the world, disasters are generally becoming less deadly. 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. This is 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 policymakers, not any innovation. And the primary metric is loss avoidance, which is often difficult to estimate and difficult to estimate. 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 take these advances further. Specifically, the United Nations and WMO 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 strengthen the power of prediction for everyone and build their capacity to act.” As countries like the US face another summer of wildfires, floods and heat waves – and with the world likely to exceed its 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 because climate change increases disaster risks and a coherent strategy will be needed to address them.
Improved disaster forecasting is a huge, underrated success story
The downward trend in deaths from natural disasters is something to behold. In the early 20th century, annual deaths from disasters sometimes exceeded one million. By the 1970s, deaths were down to about 100,000 a year, and in the current decade, to half that number or less. There have been a few years that bucked this trend in the last century as particularly severe disasters hit, but the overall decline remains. And keep in mind that there were only 2 billion people in the world in 1900, compared to 7.8 billion today. Two main factors have saved lives even amid increasingly dangerous disasters and growing populations: better forecasts 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 much 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, 24 hours warning before a storm reduces damage by 30 percent. Two extra days of lead time and a more accurate storm track is a huge improvement that has helped 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 the lead time for extreme weather events such as heat waves and heavy rainfall, as well as longer-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 problems, such as famine. Even for disasters that have many intersecting factors, such as wildfires, researchers are getting better at predicting when the next blazes will break out. In the US, the National Interagency Fire Center publishes seasonal fire outlooks that can help officials allocate firefighting teams and conduct preventive maintenance. And when fires do ignite, modelers can factor in weather, geography, and vegetation to predict not just the flames, but other related impacts. “If you had a decent idea of what was going to happen in terms of how flammable a particular area is, you could use that information to develop predictions of what you would expect in terms of downwind smoke effects,” Matthew Hurteau said. a biology professor at the University of New Mexico who studies wildfires and climate. On the other hand, unpredictable disasters are still a strong 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. Thus, tornado warnings have not improved in the same way as hurricane forecasts. 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 US. Geological disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are even more difficult to predict. Even so, scientists have improved their understanding of where such events will occur, and while they have measured lead times in minutes, parts of the world now have earthquake early warning systems. Better earthquake detection and warnings have also improved tsunami warning systems. The point is that the places in the world with the strongest disaster prediction and warning programs are often the wealthiest areas. Between 1970 and 2019, more than 91 percent of all weather- and climate-related deaths occurred in developing countries, according to the WMO. Only half of the world’s countries have multi-hazard early warning systems, and in regions such as Africa, Latin America and island countries, there are large gaps in weather and climate observations. So creating disaster warning systems for everyone in the world, and doing it in five years, is a monumental task. “It’s an extremely ambitious goal, but an important one,” Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Naval Academy, said in an email.
The destruction of a disaster does not end with the storm
Despite the seasonal scale and devastation of events such as hurricanes and wildfires, it can be surprisingly difficult to address the full extent of their impacts. One can add up the casualties when the ground shakes, the wind blows and the rain falls, but how many deaths and injuries in the aftermath of the event must be added to the tally? And when it comes to “natural” disasters, it can be difficult to separate which effects come from forces of nature and which come from human causes, such as construction in high-risk areas or a poor disaster response. “Historically, indirect deaths have either not been identified at all or have been very poorly identified,” Montano said. Look at the list of the deadliest hurricanes in the US and you’ll notice that most of them were decades ago, with some more than a century in the past. However, there are some obvious outliers. Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a Category 5 storm with winds exceeding 175 miles per hour, officially killed about 1,800 people. Hurricane Maria in 2017, also a category 5, killed more than 3,000. But the true toll of these disasters was likely far greater. Puerto Rico’s power outage after Hurricane Maria in 2017 lasted for months, contributing to the disaster’s death toll. Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images While the storms themselves were extremely violent, both hurricanes had long tails of destruction. Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee collapse in New Orleans led to flooding and road closures that lasted more than 40 days. After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico suffered the largest blackout in US history, leaving residents without power for vital medical equipment, refrigerators and lighting for months. Warnings may have helped some people avoid the brunt of the storms, but much of the devastation from those disasters came afterward because of a failure to prepare and respond. “The theory is with better warnings, you should see a reduction [in deaths], and in many cases we do. But then you factor in socioeconomics, and even with warnings, you can still have very high death tolls,” 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 wide differences in who is equipped to evacuate before a disaster and who has the resources to restart their lives in its wake. For example, in the US, heat waves are the deadliest weather phenomenon. But even with the warnings, there is nothing we can do about them except seek air conditioning. Access to refrigeration, however,…
