We have seen natural disasters happen before, but this year they have reached new levels of severity. California has seen its share of wildfires, but the Camp Fire burned 150,000 acres, the largest of all major fires. Hurricanes are not strange to Florida, but Hurricane Michael's Category 4 winds made it the strongest ever to reach state limits. Tropical storms in the Pacific also occur with hurricanes in the Atlantic regularly, but Hong Kong officials this year issued a rare warning from the 10th signal before the storm hit the city.
As natural disasters become more and more common, we need to do away with old ways of thinking, talking about, and preparing for dangerous weather. And in December 2018, scientists at a Society for Risk Analysis meeting in New Orleans listed the reasons for writing a set of rules for dealing with this increasingly mysterious world.
Forest fires
Wildfires in the United States are getting bigger and bigger and reaching farther and wider locations.
Alison Cullen, an expert in environmental risk and policy assessment at the University of Washington, and Harry Bodshwitt, a graduate student studying fire and the quantitative environment at the University of Washington, have studied satellite data to track the synchronization of fires over a 32-year period. During the first sixteen years - from 1984 to 1999 - only two fires burned more than 50,000 acres in the southwest of the country, which is known as a vast area of arid lands that includes the states of New Mexico and Arizona, a third of Texas, and part of the northern region. The extreme western of Oklahoma.
The next fifteen years looked a little different. From 2000 to 2015, 34 fires of this size broke out in the same area. It also became more common for more than one big fire to break out at a time. At one point, five very large fires broke out in the southwest in one month, Budschwitt says. Previously, it was rare for more than one fire to occur.
Weather patterns can also help experts determine whether an area is more vulnerable to simultaneous wildfires. For example, higher than normal temperatures in the Northern Rocky Mountains were associated with a greater likelihood of simultaneous large fires. The great fuel moisture in the Great Basin region of Nevada - that is, the bushes becoming dry and the plants burning rapidly - was closely related to those fires in this area.
Colin adds that US states and cities tend to share fire-fighting resources, whether it's manpower, water tanks, helicopters, or other operational forces that help them quell their fiery foe. So an understanding of local conditions - such as those identified by Coleen and Boudschett in the southwest - is essential if people on the ground want to adopt locally appropriate fire-prevention practices and prepare for the inevitable.
Coastal floods
With sea levels expected to rise around the world, many coastal cities are trying to prepare for unprecedented floods by the end of this century. But how do you know what practical steps to take? How can we adapt city dwellers to these changes?
This is what Tamson Lyle - founder of Ebbwater Consulting, an engineering firm - is exploring in her hometown Vancouver. I began by preparing risk maps to see which areas in the city would be expected to witness the most floods, and how many.
Then, using the picturesque Kitsilano neighborhood as a model, Lyle worked with city employees to figure out how much flood water could handle the neighborhood's plumbing, roads and other infrastructure. She met other city employees to tell them about the floods and to survey their reactions. Lyle asked them how much flooding people could handle, and what mitigation strategies would work with them.
People were expected to be more comfortable with flooding parks and tennis courts than their homes or schools. But Layle says that people's tolerance to the floods was much lower than she expected, and that many people - often neighborhood residents - walked out of her meetings because they were never comfortable with hypothetical flood scenarios. "It's a very, very terrible problem," she adds.
Knowing what matters most to the people who live in the neighborhood can give engineers a place to start. When you take the famous Kitsilano pool by the sea, for example, some people swim in the pool every day in the summer for their entire lives, says Lyell. Protecting the pool is important to them, even if protecting the pool from additional floods seems unreasonable.
Also important is how you engage with the population. Lyle says that photos, testimonies, and storytelling are far more effective than shocking people with the facts. People should engage with the problem to help solve it, rather than just step aside.
Tsunami
Education can do a lot to protect people from natural disasters like tsunamis. Meanwhile, taking other steps to protect city beaches - such as installing sea walls - could put more people at risk.
Tsunamis are caused by deep ocean earthquakes, and differ from forest fires and coastal floods in that they are not caused by weather conditions that are directly affected by climate change. It is true that earthquakes in the depths of the ocean are caused by tsunamis, but Logan says his simulations show that tsunamis may increase with sea level rise, giving him the ability to inflict more damage.
"I want to stress one thing that we need to stay away from the open areas, but we can't just let the people out there," says Tom Logan - a PhD candidate in Industrial and Process Engineering at the University of Michigan. Logan is the lead author on a new study on tsunami risk mitigation, published in Nature Sustainability and presented at a risk analysis conference.
To get a look at the intersection of adaptive measures - such as sea wall construction, urban development, and human behavior - Logan sheds light on Taro, Japan. The city was hit by four tsunamis in the last 120 years. He built a model that incorporated land use change, human behavior and the size of the tsunami to study the vulnerability of a city with sea walls of varying sizes. The feeling of security that these walls provide to the population can cause more people to settle near tsunami areas, exposing them to harm.
This is especially true when addressing the human tendency to forget about truly painful events over time. Fading collective memory of the last tsunami would affect current and future vulnerabilities. Ironically, this means that more frequent natural disasters can reduce our vulnerability because repetition preserves that memory. But Logan says we shouldn't underestimate “soft adaptations” like education when it comes to dealing with natural disasters.
Climate change
Protecting ourselves from these types of disasters must include the factor that pushes many natural disasters to the extreme, and that is climate change. And only when people engage with the problem in a meaningful way can start taking action on climate change.
In order to find more effective ways to reach people about this big problem, Janet Yang - a professor of communication at the State University of New York at Buffalo - examines the climate change messages to which people of different political inclinations have responded. In line with findings from psychological research, I have found that we are more likely to care about threats and feel motivated to take action on them when they are psychologically closer to us.
Yang designed a set of questionnaires that first got people to watch a short video clip, and then asked them a series of questions. In the video clip, either the threat that people can relate to (out of coffee!) Or what they feel is just a theoretical idea (an unknown disease transmitted by ticks) in the United States or Indonesia.
And the message that viewers responded to was based on their self-proclaimed political affiliation, Yang found. Conservatives tended to report the highest level of interest and political support after watching a video about tick-borne diseases in the United States, which the authors see is an extension of many conservatives' sensitivity to new ideas and psychological distancing. Meanwhile, liberals were more responsive to climate messages, but indicated that they were less enthusiastic to act when they saw videos about the direct and immediate impacts of climate change and raised concerns about how effective climate action would be. A follow-up study found that liberals responded better to articles about solutions to climate change rather than simply listing seemingly insurmountable problems.
Yang concludes that the key to talking about climate change is to create a message that takes into account a person's own view of the world. When talking to someone on the left, try to engage in solutions to the problem of climate change. When talking to someone more conservative, avoid giving an example of a polar bear on an iceberg and bring up something more directly related to that person. We need to highlight local examples of climate change impacts, and concrete steps we can take to mitigate it. Other than that, it is very easy for people of all political directions to turn away. And don't allow yourself to get away from the problem, as everyone needs to reassess what stands between them and climate action.
We are all in uncharted territory. This means that we need to talk more about extreme cases of weather and how it evolved. Updating rules and procedures may help us protect ourselves and the most vulnerable people among us from future disasters.