The way we talk about disasters affects the way we all perceive the risks that they bring. Getting the term right is crucial because it shapes how we think about disasters and how they are linked to issues like climate change. Our changing climate is making large weather events like droughts, hurricanes, droughts and wildfires worse.
Extreme weather events like these often happen in countries where many people live in poverty. We help vulnerable communities recover after disaster, but the climate crisis is making challenging situations worse.
The climate crisis is a human crisis, permanently changing the lives of millions of people living vulnerable locations around the world. It is having a huge impact on people who depend on the weather for their livelihoods. However, if we can agree to drop the term, we see several ways it can be beneficial:. Your email address will not be published.
Search all blogs Search this blog only. City ruins of an earthquake unknown location. Source: Pixabay By Giulia Roder. My work is related to the 'Water for Sustainable Development' project which aims to stimulate sustainable development in the Asia Pacific. I hold a PhD from the University of Padova Italy and my work was related to flooding and human interactions through the analysis of flood dynamics in anthropogenic landscapes, risk perception and preparedness studies in different communities worldwide.
My interest in these topics raised in the remote Central Mountain Range in Taiwan when I have been hosted by one of the oldest indigenous communities.
Since then, I have been contributing to the blog and with several activities during the Assembly. Leave a Reply Cancel Reply Your email address will not be published. The world has recently experienced dramatic warming, which scientists increasingly attribute to airborne emissions of carbon, and around the world Katrina is widely seen as evidence of socially induced climatic change.
Much as a single hurricane such as Katrina, even when followed by an almost equally intense Hurricane Rita, or even when embedded in a record season of Atlantic hurricanes, is not in itself conclusive evidence of humanly induced global warming.
Yet it would be irresponsible to ignore such signals. The Bush administration has done just that, and it is happy to attribute the dismal record of death and destruction on the Gulf Coast—perhaps 1, lives by the latest counts—to an act of nature.
It has proven itself not just oblivious but ideologically opposed to mounting scientific evidence of global warming and the fact that rising sea levels make cities such as New Orleans, Venice, or Dhaka immediately vulnerable to future calamity.
Vulnerability, in turn, is highly differentiated; some people are much more vulnerable than others. Put bluntly, in many climates rich people tend to take the higher land leaving to the poor and working-class land more vulnerable to flooding and environmental pestilence. In New Orleans, however, topographic gradients doubled as class and race gradients, and as the Katrina evacuation so tragically demonstrated, the better off had cars to get out, credit cards and bank accounts for emergency hotels and supplies, their immediate families likely had resources to support their evacuation, and the wealthier also had the insurance policies for rebuilding.
Not just the market but successive administrations from the federal to the urban scale, made the poorest population in New Orleans most vulnerable. At the same time, they syphoned resources toward tax cuts for the wealthy and a failed war in Iraq. After causes and vulnerability comes preparedness. The incompetence of preparations for Katrina, especially at the federal level, is well known.
As soon as the hurricane hit Florida, almost three days before New Orleans, it was evident that this storm was far more dangerous than its wind speeds and intensity suggested. Meteorologists knew it would hit a multistate region but the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA , overseen by a political appointee with no relevant experience and recently subordinated to the Department of Homeland Security, assumed business as usual.
They sent only a quarter of available search and rescue teams to the region and no personnel to New Orleans until after the storm had passed. Days afterward, as the president hopped from photo-op to photo-op, the White House, not given to listening to its scientists, seemed still not to understand the prescience of that warning or the dimensions of the disaster.
The results of Hurricane Katrina and responses to it are as of this writing still fresh in our memory but it is important to record some of the details so that the rawness of what transpired not be rubbed smooth by historical rewrite. The results can be assessed in thousands of lives unnecessarily lost, billions of dollars of property destroyed, local economies devastated and so forth, but that is only half the story. The images ricocheting around the world of a crippled United States, unconcerned or unable to protect its own population, receiving offers of aid from more than countries, only reaffirmed for many the sense, already crystalizing from the debacle in Iraq, of a failing superpower.
As the true horror unfolded, the media were working without a script, and it took almost a week before pre-existing absorptive news narratives regained control. But by then it was too late. When the National Guard did arrive, it was quickly apparent that they were working under orders to control the city militarily and protect property rather than to bring aid to the desperate.
Angry citizens, who waded through the fetid city looking for promised buses that never came, were prevented, at gunpoint, from getting out. Groups of refugees who tried to organize water, food, and shelter collectively were also broken up at gunpoint by the National Guard.
Numerous victims reported being besieged and the National Guard was under orders not to distribute their own water. As late as four days after the hurricane hit New Orleans, with government aid still largely absent, President Bush advised refugees that they ought to rely on private charities such as the Salvation Army. When the first federal aid did come, stunned recipients opening boxes asked why they were being sent anthrax vaccine. Unfortunately, shocking as it was, the tragedy of New Orleans is neither unique nor even especially unexpected, except perhaps in its scale.
The race and class dimensions of who escaped and who was victimized by this decidedly unnatural disaster not only could have been predicted, and was, but it follows a long history of like experiences.
In , a devastating earthquake eventually killed 23, people in Guatemala and made 1.
0コメント