SWBP: Vulnerability to Natural Disasters

SWBP is Solutions for the World's Biggest Problems, a book I'm reading
2007, edited by Bjorn Lomborg, Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center
Ch. 10, Vulnerability to Natural Disasters, by Roger A. Pielke, Jr., University of Colorado
Summary and commentary

Can you protect me? I feel so vulnerable...

The main point the author makes, it seems to me, is that "the impacts of climate on society result fromthe interaction of the climate event and societal vulnerability to experiencing impacts." Reducing vulnerability has been ignored or underemphasized. Many cost-effective solutions have remained unimplemented, in developed and developing countries, alike.

In other words, when Al Gore puts up a picture of a hurricane and links it to global warming and says we should go to his site and learn about solutions, and then do things like buy the better lightbulbs and buy energy-star products and drive less, well that's all well and good, but totally off-mark: The best response to hurricanes is not to focus on Energy policy and the mitigation of greenhouse gases (although still good, of course), but rather to prepare and adapt to future natural disasters.

It's not one or the other; we should do both. It's just that, by the numbers, preparation is far more effective. Emissions reduction policy would only address a subset of the many causes of climate change, and a policy 5 times as effective as fully implementing Kyoto would only do 4.5% as much as building societal resilience. There's just no comparison.

The ratios he calculates for the difference in effectiveness of reducing the increases in ghg concentration vs. adaptation, under varying conditions, ranges between 5:1 to 22:1.

The skew in current priorities is reflected in a recent RAND study that US funding for disaster loss-reduction research in '05 was $127 million, only 7 percent of the amount invested in climate change research that year.

An example of how effective policies like risk assessment techniques, better building codes, code enforcement, land-use standards, and emergency-preparedness plans can be is the difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (on the same island) in 2004, when Haiti lost 2 thousand people and the D.R. lost only ten, due to their investment in shelters and emergency evacuation networks.

For disaster-preparedness/adaptation to happen, the author believes the issues of climate change and disaster vulnerability need to be clearly separated in the eyes of the media, the public, environmental activists, scientists, and policymakers. Changing (and current) weather-patterns demand it.

But let's get away from hurricanes. In addition to wind storms, earthquakes and floods are also the other 2 main categories of natural disaster. Other forms are droughts, epidemics, extreme temperatures, forest/scrub fires, volcanoes, and avalanches/landslides. The chapter has pie charts showing each category by number of deaths, amount of "losses" (does that include deaths?). Did they miss any?

Disaster losses have been increasing rapidly in increasing decades. But there are some important points to be made: 1) The Indian Ocean Tsunami killed more than 275,000 people while Katrina killed fewer than 1500, showing that much of the human toll takes place in developing countries. 2) Like Jesus said with the poor woman who gave all she had, the cost of disasters might not be measured best in the sum of economic losses, but what proportion of the country's overall economic activity was hit, and 3) disaster vulnerability response should be made a priority for the international community. It's a low global development priority, for some reason.

For effective action to take place, the author recommends:
1) getting the concept on the map by separating it from global-warming/energy-policy.
GHG emissions reduction, it is noted, does not have an effect for several decades on hazard risk.

2) Agreed upon globally-accepted standards:
-creating a globally accepted standard of acceptable disaster vulnerability, so countries' status and progress can be measured and compared.
-the creation of an open-source disaster database according to agreed upon standards.
-agreed-upon peer-reviewed procedures for normalizing economic loss data.

So sensible, anyone could have written it, in my opinion. Good stuff.