DISASTERS, DEATH, AND DESTRUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF RECENT CALAMITIES

Roger A Pielke, Jr. Oceanography, 19:138-147, 2006. 

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Remarks from the Seventh Annual Roger Revelle Commemorative Lecture. This lecture was created by the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academies in honor of Dr. Roger Revelle to highlight the important links between ocean sciences and public policy. This year the lecturer was Roger A. Pielke, Jr. and the lecture was held on March 15, 2006 at the Baird Auditorium in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

INTRODUCTION

A disaster happens when an extreme event occurs in the context of societal vulnerability. Nowhere is the meeting of vulnerability and extreme more tangible than where the land meets the sea. This was horrifically apparent on 26 December 2004 when a powerful earthquake under the eastern Indian Ocean caused a massive tsunami that killed more than 280,000 people and caused billions of dollars (all dollars in this article refer to U.S. dollars) in damage. Other disasters at the ocean-land boundary are similarly fresh in our minds-the U.S. hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and more deaths than in the previous 35 years combined. We do not have to look too far back in time to recall other tragedies, such as Hurricane Jeanne, which killed several thousand people in Haiti in 2004; the Venezuelan coastal landslides in 1999, which killed upwards of 30,000 people; and Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which killed more than 10,000 people, mainly in Nicaragua and Honduras (Taft, 2004; Pielke et al., 2003). In 1991, perhaps 150,000 people died in Bangladesh as the result of storm surge and fl ooding from a tropical cyclone (Pielke and Pielke, 1997).

The recent spate of disasters has created two common perceptions among decision-makers and the general public. First, there is a sense that the economic impacts associated with extreme events have increased in recent years. Second, given that a human influence on the climate

system has been well established, a perception exists that the recent increase in weather-related disasters like floods and hurricanes is in some way related to changes in climate.

These perceptions beg two questions:

* Have loss of life and damages associated with extreme weather events actually increased in recent years?

* What factors account for observed trends in the impacts of weather on society?

The answers to these questions are more than simply idle speculations-they help shape how we think about policy options with important social, economic, and political ramifications (such as disaster preparation, insurance, international climate-change negotiations) and how we set priorities for the funding of scientific research. Because policy is based in part on the perceptions that policy-makers hold about weather and climate, it is worth determining the answers to the two questions in a scientifi cally rigorous manner. This lecture discusses trends in damages associated with disasters with a focus on extreme weather events, floods, and hurricanes. It also discusses factors that account for the observed trends and the state of our knowledge in this area. It concludes with a discussion of implications for policy and research related to natural hazards and global climate change.

[...]

WHERE FROM HERE?

Despite robust scientific research to the contrary, assertions persist that global warming is directly linked to rising disaster losses. For those seeking to raise public concern, such assertions may have short-term political benefits in the global-warming debate, but they detract from serious efforts to prepare for disasters. To emphasize, humans have an effect on the global climate system and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions makes good sense. But reducing emissions will not discernibly affect the trend of escalating disaster losses because the

cause of that increase lies in ever-growing societal vulnerability. Faced with the inescapable momentum of these socioeconomic trends, the crucial question is this: What can be done to better prepare the world-especially the developing world-for future disasters?

Once we understand that the chief reason for increasing disaster losses is the role of demographics in making a country vulnerable to disaster, we can better focus responses on managing vulnerability. But the narrow focus of the climate debate to date on emissions reductions has worked against a clear focus on vulnerability.

The U.N. Framework Convention, for example, has refused to fund disaster preparedness efforts unless states could demonstrate exactly how the disasters they feared were linked to climate 

change (more information available at HYPERLINK http://www.unfccc.int http://www.unfccc.int). Consider, too, the amount spent on scientific research.

According to a recent RAND study, U.S. funding for disaster loss-reduction research in 2003 amounted to about $127 million-only 7 percent of the amount invested in climate-change research for that year (Meade and Abbott, 2003). Efforts in Congress to create a coordinated research program focused on reducing disaster losses have never gained momentum. By contrast, the U.S. government has sponsored a coordinated, multi-agency framework for climate-change research for more than 15 years, with total investments of more than $30 billion, adjusted for inflation (Sarewitz and Pielke, 2005).

This is not to say that many thousands of people and hundreds of organizations worldwide are not productively confronting disaster vulnerability, but their efforts do not begin to address the magnitude of the problem. Thousands of participants from most of the world's nations, along with scientists and political advocates, have come together every year since 1995 to work toward concerted international action on climate change. But, when the U.N. World Conference on Disaster Reduction met in January 2005, it was the fi rst such meeting in more than a decade (more information available at HYPERLINK http://www.unisdr.org/wcdr http://www.unisdr.org/wcdr).

While the prospects for global climate change are constantly in the public eye, Hurricane Katrina and the South Asian earthquake and tsunami poignantly demonstrate that the crisis of growing disaster vulnerability only becomes news after disaster strikes. Yet we know that effective action is possible to reduce disaster losses even in the face of poverty and dense population. During the 2004 hurricane season, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, both on the island of Hispaniola, provided a powerful lesson in this regard. As Julia Taft of the U.N. Development Program explained: "In the Dominican Republic, which has invested in hurricane shelters and emergency evacuation networks, the death toll was fewer than ten, as compared to an estimated two thousand in Haiti.... Haitians were a hundred times more likely to die in an equivalent storm than Dominicans" (Taft, 2005).

Most tools needed to reduce disaster vulnerability already exist, such as riskassessment

techniques, better building codes and code enforcement, land-use standards, and emergency-preparedness plans. The question is: Why is disaster vulnerability so low on the list of global development priorities? Says Brian Tucker, president of GeoHazards International:

"The most serious fl aw in our current efforts is the lack of a globally accepted standard of acceptable disaster vulnerability, and an action plan to put every country on course to achieve this standard. Then we would have a means to measure progress and to make it clear which countries are doing well and which are not. We need a natural disaster equivalent to the Kyoto Protocol" (Sarewitz and Pielke, 2005).

Those who justify the need for greenhouse-gas reductions by exploiting the mounting human and economic toll of natural disasters worldwide are either ill-informed or disingenuous. This is not, as Britain's Sir David King suggested, "something we can manage" simply by decreasing our use of fossil fuels (The Guardian, 2004).

In principle, fruitful action on both climate change and disasters should proceed simultaneously. In practice, this will not happen until the issues of climate change and disaster vulnerability are clearly separated in the eyes of the media, the public,  environmental activists, scientists, and policy-makers. There are good reasons for more substantial action on energy policies, particularly in the United States; and there are good reasons for concern about the growing toll of disaster losses around the world. But suggestions that the escalating disaster losses should motivate action on energy policy simply cannot lead 

to an effective approach to disaster management.

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