Disaster strikes

Many thousands of people in the Philippines face a staggeringly complex set of challenges. Now made homeless, their belongings destroyed by Typhoons Rolly and Ulysses, they were already in the middle of the pandemic and the accompanying economic downturn. It’s not just that one disaster is coming so close to the next, each disaster exponentially increases the problems of their survivors in ways that defy the statistics that are used to describe these disasters.

The numbers of dead, homeless and evacuated, the farmland laid waste, buildings destroyed provide a kind of top down idea of what’s happened. They’re like an aerial shot looking down at the floods, or a map to provide people who are not themselves in the disaster a way to understand what’s happened.

People’s lives are being wrecked; they are injured, sick and grieving, there will be no school for the children, for adults there is no work, there is no money for food, or any other necessities. Nor can families, communities, villages and towns rely on the usual means to slowly claw their way back from the destitution wrought by disasters, season after season. These are not normal times. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the global economy to its knees. Even though there is new hope in the form of a vaccine, it’s not going to help feed, clothe and shelter everyone now.

More than 240,000 people lost their homes to Typhoon Rolly and were living in makeshift shelters along the coast when Typhoon Ulysses hit. The Philippines is comparatively well prepared for disasters simply by virtue of being so vulnerable to so many, but government emergency response funds have been depleted by the coronavirus pandemic. International humanitarian agencies are also stretched to their limits.

Nevertheless, scientists warn that climate change is making storms like these more destructive. The Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center just last month released a report saying extreme weather events have increased dramatically and now dominate the disaster landscape in the 21st century. It said the last 20 years saw major floods more than double from 1,389 to 3,254, while storms grew from 1,457 to 2,034.

“More lives are being saved but more people are being affected by the expanding climate emergency. Disaster risk is becoming systemic, with one event overlapping and influencing another in ways that are testing our resilience to the limit,” said Mami Mizutori, the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction. “The odds are being stacked against us when we fail to act on science and early warnings to invest in prevention, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction.”

Eight of the top ten countries experiencing disasters are in Asia.

The top five in descending order are China, the US, India, the Philippines and Indonesia, all with “large and heterogenous landmasses and relatively high population densities in at-risk areas,” according to a UN press release. It found the pandemic was increasing the needs of people suffering from climate-related disasters, compounding the vulnerabilities they face and hampering their recovery.

It’s clear that dramatic and innovative ideas are needed to save people from the human misery we are seeing today in Southern Luzon. The World Meteorological Organization has found that one in three people globally are still not adequately covered by early-warning systems, despite extreme weather and climate events increasing “in frequency, intensity and severity as result of climate change.” Experts working in the overlap between climate change, natural disasters and emergency aid are calling for the world to “move from early warning to early action.” They are emphasizing impact-based forecasting and forecast-based financing. A month ago the International Federation of the Red Cross said it “can and will do more, and reach further, to make anticipation our new normal.’

Here in the UK, the Climate Change Committee recently suggested that the coronavirus crisis could become a turning point in the fight against climate change. The Committee provided comprehensive new advice to the government on delivering an economic recovery designed to accelerate the transition to a cleaner, net-zero emissions economy and strengthen resilience to the impacts of climate change.

If trillions of dollars are going to be spent on coronavirus recovery – the largest amount since the end of World War II – “let’s think about what we want,” said Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. “This needs to be part of a bigger ambition,” he added.

Reading about all this international planning gives me the same vertiginous feeling of looking down from a great height at the actual disasters. It seems to come from a very different place than the dreadful wreckage, injuries, deprivation and death at ground level.

Nevetheless, links between them must be made for everyone’s sake. “When it comes to climate change and risk, we’re all on the front line,” as the president of the Swedish Red Cross, Margareta Wahlström, put it. Science and local knowledge together might just provide a way to show people who suddenly have nothing that their lives mean something.