Our Future On A Hotter Planet Means More Climate Disasters Happening Simultaneously

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A firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service battles the advancing Caldor Fire on Aug. 28 in Strawberry, Calif.





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Marlon Maldonado helps his wife and child into a boat on Aug. 31 in Barataria, La., to travel to their home after it flooded during Hurricane Ida.





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Marlon Maldonado helps his wife and child into a boat on Aug. 31 in Barataria, La., to travel to their home after it flooded during Hurricane Ida.


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Also, one disaster quickly disappears from the headlines when the next one hits. As a result, people who still need a lot of help getting back on their feet can feel abandoned. Fugate says that’s a danger right now for communities in Louisiana that were hit by hurricanes just last year.

«I was getting messages from people saying, ‘I hope they don’t forget about us. We have not rebuilt, and we still have places that haven’t been repaired,’ he says.

Fugate and others say that the quickening pace of natural disasters demands changes in emergency response. For one thing, recovery efforts have to move faster, to keep up.

Samantha Montano, who teaches emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, says that some aid currently gets slowed to a crawl by complicated paperwork that’s supposed to prevent waste and fraud. «Obviously that’s important, but when those measures prevent people from getting the help that they need, then something is wrong and something needs to change, she says.

Even more important, they say, is acting ahead of time to get people and critical infrastructure out of harm’s way. «We’ve got to reduce the impacts of extreme events like hurricanes, Fugate says. That can mean upgrading building codes, requiring sturdier buildings and, in some places, burying power lines. Those measures can be expensive. Persuading people to move out of flood zones can be painful. But Montano says such measures can avoid more pain down the road.

Extreme weather by itself isn’t the problem, she says. «It’s when that hurricane comes ashore and meets a community that is living in poverty or doesn’t have strong-enough building codes or doesn’t have enough boats to do search and rescue — that’s when it becomes a disaster, she says.

Coughlan de Perez says communities all over the world are trying to do this. But it’s really hard to get ready for the dangers of a warming world «because we haven’t seen it, right? So our past understanding of the world, based on our lived experience, is no longer a good predictor of our current risk and our future risk.

But with sea levels rising and hot summers turning forests into kindling, many people are realizing that places they thought were safe may now be vulnerable.