http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20080904/us_time/whydisastersaregettingworse;_ylt=AuYIQjsFlNMWTuzAGQjR52es0NUE
By AMANDA RIPLEY Thu Sep 4, 12:40 PM
ET
In the space of two weeks, Hurricane Gustav has caused an
estimated $3 billion in losses in the U.S. and killed about 110
people in the U.S. and the Caribbean, catastrophic floods in
northern India have left a million people homeless, and a
6.2-magnitude earthquake has rocked China's southwest, smashing
over 400,000 homes.
If it seems like disasters are getting more common, it's because
they are. But some disasters do seem to be affecting us worse - and
not for the reasons you may think. Floods and storms have led to
most of the excess damage. The number of flood and storm disasters
has gone up by 7.4% every year in recent decades, according to the
Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. (Between
2000 and 2007, the growth was even faster - with an average annual
rate of increase of 8.4%.) Of the total 197 million people affected
by disasters in 2007, 164 million were affected by floods.
It is tempting to look at the line-up of storms in the Atlantic
(Hanna, Ike, Josephine) and, in the name of everything green, blame
climate change for this state of affairs. But there
is another inconvenient truth out there: We are getting more
vulnerable to weather mostly because of where we live, not
just how we live.
In recent decades, people around the world have moved en masse
to big cities near water. The population of
Miami-Dade County in Florida was about 150,000 in the 1930s,
a decade fraught with severe hurricanes. Since then, the population
of Miami-Dade County has rocketed 1,600% to 2,400,000.
So the same intensity hurricane today wreaks all sorts of havoc
that wouldn't have occurred had human beings not migrated. (To see
how your own coastal county has changed in population, check out
this cool
graphing tool from the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.)
If climate change is having an effect on the intensities of
storms, it's not obvious in the historical weather data. And
whatever effect it is having is much, much smaller than the effect
of development along the coastlines. In fact, if you look at all
storms from 1900 to 2005 and imagine we had today's populations on
the coasts, as Roger Pielke, Jr., and his
colleagues did in a
2008 Natural Hazards Review paper, you would see that the worst
hurricane would have actually happened in 1926.
If it happened today, the Great Miami storm would have caused $140 to $157 billion in
damages. (Hurricane Katrina, the costliest storm in U.S. history,
caused $100 billion in losses.) "There has been no trend in the
number or intensity of storms at landfall since 1900,"says Pielke,
a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. "The storms themselves haven't
changed."
What's changed is what we've put in the storm's way. Crowding
together in coastal cities puts us at risk on a few levels. First,
it is harder for us to evacuate before a storm because of gridlock.
And in much of the developing world, people don't get the kinds of
early warnings that Americans get. So large
migrant populations - usually living in flimsy housing - get
flooded out year after year. That helps explain why Asia has
repeatedly been the hardest hit by disasters in recent years.
Secondly, even if we get all the humans to safety, we still have
more stuff in harm's way. So each big hurricane costs more than the
big one before it, even controlling for inflation.
But the most insidious effect of building condos and industry
along the water is that we are systematically stripping the coasts
of the protection that used to cushion the blow of extreme weather. Three years after Katrina, southern
Louisiana is still losing a football field worth of wetlands every
38 minutes.
Human beings have been clearing away our best protections all
over the world, says Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "The natural
protections are diminishing - whether you're talking about mangrove
forests in areas affected by the Indian ocean
tsunami, wetlands in the Gulf Coast or
forests, which offer protection against landslides and
mudslides."
Before we become hopelessly lost in despair, however, there is
good news: we can do something about this problem. We can enact
meaningful building codes and stop keeping insurance premiums
artificially low in flood zones.
But first we need to understand that disasters aren't just
caused by FEMA and greenhouse gases. Says Tierney: "I don't think that
people have an understanding of questions they should be asking -
about where they live, about design and construction, about
building inspection, fire protection. These just aren't things that are on
people's minds."
Increasingly, climate change is on
people's minds, and that is all for the better. Even if climate
change has not been the primary driver of disaster losses, it is
likely to cause far deadlier disasters in the future if left
unchecked.
But even if greenhouse gas emissions plummeted miraculously next
year, we would not expect to see a big change in disaster losses.
So it's important to stay focused on the real cause of the problem,
says Pielke. "Talking about land-use policies in coastal
Mississippi may not be the sexiest topic, but that's what's going
to make the most difference on this issue." View this article on
Time.com