The Most Important Thing We Can Do to Prepare for Weather Extremes: Politics aside, it’s time to get serious about adaptation

By Jason Lloyd and Alex Trembath in Slate. Excerpt:

"But, as with other major recent storms, the staggering amount of damage Hurricane Harvey caused was less a factor of the strength of the storm and more a factor of the scale of the human development it hit.

It’s part of a larger American story. We’re building more—and building more expensive things—in the path of natural disasters. We’re living in more concentrated areas that, when struck, cause economic losses to add up fast. We love to reside near coasts, in flood plains, or on fault lines and, in doing so, expose more of our wealth and citizens to the hazards associated with them. And, once we’re there, inadequate or unenforced land-use laws, imperfect evacuation procedures, and other lax planning often exacerbate the magnitude of Mother Nature’s destruction.

As an overarching trend, research has shown that the rising costs of these disasters over the decades have thus far overwhelmingly been a product of this increased exposure—not changes in the strength or frequency of these hazards, nor the influence humans may be having on them. This isn’t some climate change deniers’ conclusion, either. In the words of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Most studies of long-term disaster loss records attribute these increases in losses to increasing exposure of people and assets in at-risk areas, and to underlying societal trends—demographic, economic, political, and social—that shape vulnerability to impacts.”

If Miami and Tokyo are any indication, we appear more than willing to keep living in places with a high risk for natural disasters.

To recognize this doesn’t imply that we should stop developing or stop living in cities, or that economic development somehow isn’t worth pursuing. Economic losses from disasters have risen, but GDP has risen faster. And, as Max Roser’s team at Our World in Data has shown, though the costs from property damages may have gone up over the decades, the number of human lives lost—that much more valuable metric—dramatically dropped. This is true even though the number of people affected by natural disasters has skyrocketed.

Unsurprisingly, the wealth that’s putting more people and property at risk has a lot to do with this trend. How rich and poor countries experience disasters illustrates this vividly. A case in point comes from comparing the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan earlier this decade. The 2010 Haitian earthquake marked 7 on the Richter scale and likely killed somewhere between 46,000 and 316,000 people (disputes about the estimates account for the wide range). One year later, the Tohoku earthquake in Japan measured 9.1 and killed 16,000 people. The economic losses in Japan were far greater because there was more valuable infrastructure to destroy. But there was also far more protection in Japan, so an earthquake 100 times as strong as Haiti’s (the Richter scale is logarithmic) hit a population more than 10 times the size yet killed vastly fewer people.

There’s something more than simply being a developed country at play here, and this is the key tool for protecting against climate extremes: adaptation. If Miami, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, are any indication, we appear more than willing to keep building and living in places with a high risk for natural disasters. That’s fine—so long as our governments and communities take on the responsibility of preparing for these kinds of known vulnerabilities. As we increase our exposure, investing in disaster-resilient infrastructure and prepared citizenries not only makes moral and economic sense, it’s also not dependent on one’s personal views about climate change.

One surprising place to look for models of this, actually, is the city of Houston. Though the Texas metropolis wasn’t built to withstand a storm like Harvey (as Slate’s Henry Grabar explained in a series of pieces), it wasn’t totally unprepared for hurricanes. City planners in the 1990s redesigned Houston’s road infrastructure to “collect” excess rainwater (which the city has now had plenty of) as a means to drain major flooding. Houstonians also benefit from tools like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s flood alert system, which sends real-time information directly to people’s cellphones. Like many Sun Belt cities, Houston struggles with sprawl and maintaining its infrastructure, but its diversified economy, large population, and general prosperity mean that it will likely recover from Harvey relatively efficiently. While there’s certainly more that officials could have done, the adaptations that spared the city from more catastrophic destruction illustrate how we might do things better for the increasing number of people living in disaster-prone areas. Other U.S. cities, too, are considering or have already put in place a host of preparedness strategies, including moving generators several floors up in case of flooding, improving evacuation coordination procedures, and engaging citizens in resilience efforts

There have also been some exemplary smart adaptation efforts in less-developed parts of the world, as we detail in our book, Climate Pragmatism. In the city of Padang, Indonesia, for example, residents—like other inhabitants of archipelagos and small island nations—worry about rising sea levels and powerful storms. To prepare for such risks, the city is considering an innovative approach: creating higher ground in the form of elevated parks. It’s a fascinating twist on traditional evacuation plans. A half-dozen of these raised public spaces could save as many as 100,000 people from the threat of inundation during storms and tsunamis.

Another powerful example comes from the Indian state of Odisha, where a 1999 tropical cyclone killed more than 9,000 people. The people of Odisha, determined to avoid a similar catastrophe in the future, worked with the Indian central government and the World Bank to invest in shelters, evacuation procedures, improved storm tracking, and early warning systems. When a similar storm, Cyclone Phailin, hit the state in 2013, fewer than 50 people died. The beneficial effects of concerted resilience efforts were also on display during the recent Mexican earthquake. After a devastating temblor hit Mexico City in 1985—killing somewhere between 2,000 and 40,000 people—the country invested heavily in early warning systems, earthquake engineering, tightly regulated building codes, and evacuation protocols. Though parts of the country’s south closer to the epicenter of last week’s earthquake weren’t as prepared, damage to the capital, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the Western Hemisphere, were astonishingly minimal. The technological and social innovations of these examples point to the kind of smart development and adaptation efforts that the public can invest in to protect lives and livelihoods of populations."