Overlapping disastersCOVID-19 Highlights the Need to Plan for Joint Disasters
June 1 is the official start of hurricane season in the U.S., and scientists are predicting a particularly active season, including more major hurricanes. We have also entered the time of year when floods, heat waves and wildfires occur more often. Over the longer term, climate change is causing more frequent extreme weather events. Rising temperatures also exacerbate the spread of disease and could make pandemics more difficult to control in the future. Considering that most risk studies in the past have been focused on single events, is the U.S. prepared to deal with the possibility of extreme weather events as well as a pandemic?
The COVID-19 lockdown in the U.S. began at a time of relatively mild weather and very few natural disasters, so for the past few months, the country has been able to focus mainly on the pandemic. But this week, two dams in Michigan failed after heavy rains and flooding, forcing 11,000 people to evacuate while trying to social distance. The floodwaters also threatened the Dow Chemical plant and two hazardous Superfund waste sites, which could have precipitated an environmental disaster. In India and Bangladesh, the most powerful cyclone in more than a decade forced over three million people to evacuate as relief teams tried to protect them against infection from COVID-19.
June 1 is the official start of hurricane season in the U.S., and scientists are predicting a particularly active season, including more major hurricanes. We have also entered the time of year when floods, heat waves and wildfires occur more often. Over the longer term, climate change is causing more frequent extreme weather events. Rising temperatures also exacerbate the spread of disease and could make pandemics more difficult to control in the future. Considering that most risk studies in the past have been focused on single events, is the U.S. prepared to deal with the possibility of extreme weather events as well as a pandemic?
“…We are in a world in which global challenges are more and more integrated, and the responses are more and more fragmented, and if this is not reversed, it’s a recipe for disaster,” said Antonio Guterres, the U.N. Secretary-General, during a speech in January 2019.
Earth Institute scientists are already investigating these interconnected disasters. In May 2019, long before COVID-19, Radley Horton, associate research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and Colin Raymond, a former graduate student in earth and environmental sciences at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, now a postdoctoral researcher at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, co-organized a workshop on correlated extreme events. The workshop brought together scientists, policy experts, and representatives from government and business to examine the increasing incidence of multiple impacts that affect a locale simultaneously or sequentially. They discussed how these risks are changing with climate change and posed a challenge to planners to consider climate change and the potential for correlated extreme events as they think about long-term adaptation.
