DISASTER RESPONSEIntensifying Pace and Severity of Extreme Events Increases Risks of Compounding Disasters and Demands Rethinking of U.S. Emergency Management

There is an urgent need to reimagine disaster preparedness, mitigation, and recovery strategies in the U.S., as intensifying climate and weather hazards cause successive and compounding natural disasters that current practices cannot cope with, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The report examines the experiences of the Gulf Coast in 2020 and 2021 as it underwent successive “billion-dollar disasters.” These storms, some arriving in the same region within weeks of one another, occurred while communities were also coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. For many Gulf communities, the report says, the effects of these disasters compounded, increasing vulnerabilities, weakening response capacity, and further reducing the ability to withstand the effects of subsequent events. Compounding disasters that introduce new, interconnected, and complex risk scenarios are expected to increase in frequency and will require comprehensive new strategies for emergency planning and response.

Disasters that have impacted the Gulf in recent years cannot be examined in isolation from prior disasters, as many communities are in some state of long-term recovery from the physical and socioeconomic impacts of past events such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster and hurricanes Gustav, Harvey, Ike, and Katrina. Effective disaster recovery will require shifting from an “event” view to an “epoch” view, in order to more fully address the prolonged effects of disasters, and to reflect the reality experienced in communities, the report says.

“For too long, America responded to disasters as singular, isolated events,” said Roy Wright, chair of the committee that authored the report and president and CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. “Individual disasters do not occur in isolation amid a community’s history. With each successive punch of overlapping disaster recoveries, the vulnerabilities increase. This heightens the risk that the next event could provide a knock-out blow. These are compounding disasters.”

Additionally, much of the Gulf region’s population experience the impacts of compounding disasters alongside other hazards and vulnerabilities that are often rooted in historic, systemic, and structural discrimination. Examples of these include underinvestment in infrastructure and housing, persistent poverty, and land-use planning decisions that have marginalized people and placed them in harm’s way.