One Climate Crisis Calamity Every Week

Aftermath of the damage left by Cyclone Idai in the hard-hit province of Sofala, Mozambique. Image credit: PA/AAP 

Aftermath of the damage left by Cyclone Kenneth in a village north of Pemba, Mozambique. Image credit: Mike Hutchings/Reuters

It’s time to take heed! Climate crisis calamities are happening at the rate of one a week. 

But most draw very scant international attention. Except the big impact disasters such as cyclones Idai and Kenneth that slammed Mozambique in March and April 2019 respectively and the severe drought afflicting India – due to a combination of monsoon failure in the second half of 2018, sustained heatwaves between May and June, and underperforming rainfall in the first half of 2019 – that make headlines around the world. 

Mami Mizutori (left), the UN secretary-general’s special representative on disaster risk reduction said large numbers of “lower impact events” that are causing adversity, displacement and death are occurring much faster than predicted. 

She made it clear that this is not about the future; this is about today. 

She asserted that adapting to the climate crisis could no longer be seen as a long-term problem, but one that needed investment now. 

Estimates put the cost of climate-related disasters at $520 billion a year, while the additional cost of building infrastructure that is resistant to the effects of global heating is only about 3%, or $2.7 trillion in total over the next 20 years. 

Mizutori said: “This is not a lot of money [in the context of infrastructure spending], but investors have not been doing enough. Resilience needs to become a commodity that people will pay for”. 

That would mean normalising the standards for new infrastructure, such as housing, road and rail networks, factories, power and water supply networks, so that they are less vulnerable to the effects of floods, droughts, storms and extreme weather. 

Until now, most of the focus of work on the climate crisis has been on “mitigation” – jargon for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and not to be confused with mitigating the effects of the climate crisis. 

The question of adapting to its effects has taken a distant second place, in part because activists and scientists were concerned for years that people would gain a false complacency that we need not cut emissions as we could adapt to the effects instead, and also because while cutting emissions could be clearly measured, the question of adapting or increasing resilience was harder to pin down. 

Mizutori said the time for such arguments had run out. 

“We talk about a climate emergency and a climate crisis, but if we cannot confront this [issue of adapting to the effects] we will not survive”, she told UK’s The Guardian. “We need to look at the risks of not investing in resilience”. 

Many of the lower-impact disasters would be preventable if people have early warnings of severe weather, better infrastructure such as flood defenses or access to water in case of drought, and governments have more awareness of which areas are in most jeopardy. 

Nor is this a problem confined to the developing world, she said, as the recent forest fires in the US and Europe’s latest heatwave had shown. Rich countries also face a challenge to adapt their infrastructure and ways of protecting people from disaster. 

Mizutori called upon governments to take a more holistic view of the risks. What she said, makes a lot of sense indeed.