The Age of Climate Disaster Is Here

The planet has broiled this summer, with July winning the unwelcome title of the hottest month since records began, in the nineteenth century. Indeed, climate scientists think that it was possibly the hottest month in the past 120,000 years. Given the rapid pace of climate change, however, July offered merely a taste of the heat to come. In 2015, world leaders established a goal to keep average global surface temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. In July, global temperatures breached that critical ceiling, if only briefly. Nearly 5,000 local heat and rainfall records were broken in the United States alone; globally, the number exceeded 10,000. And scientists anticipate that 2023 will clock in as the hottest year on record.

Although climate scientists have long predicted an increase in such extreme weather events, some have recently expressed alarm at the sheer speed at which the climate is changing. The sudden explosion of record temperatures carries a warning for humans: adapt or die. The scale of the climate catastrophes suffered throughout this year reaffirms that it is no longer sufficient for governments and policymakers to focus on mitigation—in other words, developing strategies to reduce harmful pollutants emitted into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. The world must also pay more attention to adaptation, upgrading infrastructure and policies to withstand extreme weather. If governments and societies do not make adequate preparations, the damaging impacts of climate change will crush lives, livelihoods, and communities across the globe. The 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) under the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change, scheduled for late November through early December in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), provides a crucial moment for nations to finally give adaptation equal billing with mitigation on the international climate agenda. This year’s COP could herald an inflection point for climate efforts; with weather catastrophes still raging around the planet, governments should be galvanized to take more radical action than they have at previous summits.

ADAPT OR PERISH

Heat statistics alone, as shocking as they are, do not tell the whole story of climate impacts. Higher temperatures mean bigger floods, hotter and longer heat waves, more destructive wildfires, deeper droughts, and more intense storms. And the severity and longevity of this summer’s high temperatures are startling. For 31 days in a row, Phoenix, Arizona, recorded temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, heating pavement to the point that people’s—and pets’—skin burned on contact. Temperatures reached 122 degrees Fahrenheit in southwest Iran, forcing the government to declare public holidays because it was simply too hot to work. In August, the much-anticipated Boy Scout Jamboree in South Korea was cut short, with hundreds of teens falling ill from heat. With warmer, wetter conditions allowing mosquitos to flourish, the worst recorded outbreak of Dengue fever has swept Bangladesh, leaving hundreds dead and medical providers overwhelmed. Smoke from Canadian wildfires, which razed territory the size of Greece, forced millions of Americans and Canadians indoors to avoid respiratory illness. Fueled by gale-force winds, wildfires devastated the Hawaiian island of Maui, killing at least 114 people, laying waste to the historic town of Lahaina, and driving locals into the ocean to escape the flames.

Extreme precipitation has also left a trail of destruction this summer. New Delhi had half a foot of rainfall on a single day in July; deadly mudslides and flash floods followed. In normally dry Beijing, another July storm dumped the heaviest rainfall in 140 years, four times the city’s average rainfall for the entire month of August. And amid a severe heat wave across Europe in late July, Italians witnessed hail that approached the size of cantaloupes, with one stone measuring almost eight inches, the largest ever recorded in the continent.

These events come at a high human and economic cost. Homes destroyed, schooling disrupted, and supply chains broken. And it is humans who have inflicted such suffering on ourselves; the heat that devastated Europe and the southwestern United States this summer would have been “virtually impossible” in the absence of the burning of fossil fuels by humans, according to an analysis by World Weather Attribution, a nonprofit that analyzes data to determine how climate change influences extreme weather events. This causal link holds true across the globe; the record-breaking heat in China was 50 times more likely because of human-caused climate change, also according to the World Weather Attribution.

Until now, political leaders, corporations, and scientists have largely focused the climate-change discussion on cutting harmful pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. The other side of the challenge—adaptation, or preparing for catastrophic weather events like those witnessed this summer—has remained “under-resourced, underfunded and often ignored,” according to the chair of the United Kingdom’s Climate Change Adaptation Committee. Adaptation efforts—for example, elevating buildings to avoid flooding, restoring natural infrastructure such as mangrove forests to buffer sea-level rise, and investing in electric grids that will perform under extreme conditions, be they heat, cold, or drought—have remained modest even as climate-related disasters have worsened. In 2022, the UN concluded that without increased attention, the scale of climate-related disasters could outstrip existing adaptation efforts.

In addition to setting the goal of capping warming at two degrees Celsius (and preferably below 1.5 degrees), the 2015 Paris accord established the Global Goal on Adaption, aiming to “enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate change.” In the years since, policymakers have paid more attention to adaptation efforts, but their work has run into complications. Because the impacts of climate disasters are often felt locally, solutions must be tailored to local conditions, rendering the replication of large-scale blueprints for adaptation more complex. Measuring progress in adaptation is also more challenging than in mitigation; it is easier to calculate the amount of carbon not emitted into the atmosphere, for instance, than the amount of flood damage that has been averted. Given these hurdles, global adaptation objectives remain vague. Although states have worked to establish and implement adaptation goals after COP26, these discussions have stalled because of fundamental disagreements regarding targets, definitions, and finance terms. This year’s COP aims to adopt a framework that more clearly states a global strategy for climate adaptation.

WHERE WE STAND

With this summer’s catastrophes fresh in people’s minds, COP28 could prove a turning point for adaptation efforts. Never has the destructive force of climate change revealed itself so widely across the globe, and the explosion of climate-fueled disasters has given billions of people a firsthand understanding of their ferocity—and impact. Society’s newfound personal experience of climate catastrophe can, and should, serve as a propellant for increased adaptation efforts. But whether widespread calamity will push governments and political leaders to act more forcefully on climate, including adaptation, remains an open question.

Revving up adaptation efforts is crucial. No country has adequately prepared for climate change, even those that have already made significant investments in this area. The Netherlands, for instance, is a standout leader for adaptation. With more than a quarter of the country already sitting below sea level, it has invested in preparing for worst-case scenario flooding. Yet even the Dutch were caught off-guard by this summer’s record-breaking heat, as 39,000 people died during a three-week heat wave in June—five percent more than expected in that period. China’s efforts to turn 80 percent of its urban areas into “sponge cities”—cities designed to increase the absorption and reuse of rainfall—by 2030 were no match for this summer’s floods. Widespread flooding, including in the Beijing area, exposed the inadequacy of China’s flood-prevention efforts, with nearly a million people forced to evacuate. In the United States, the number of so-called billion-dollar disasters, or disasters costing more than a billion dollars each, has ballooned from six in 2002 to 18 in 2022. In the first seven months of 2023 alone, the United States has experienced 15 such disasters. Despite the escalating destruction, the U.S. government has failed to develop a national adaptation strategy, making it an outlier among developed nations; most developed countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, and those in the European Union have embraced such strategies as essential tools for managing climate risk.

Whether COP28 will be a watershed on adaptation—or, for that matter, on curbing emissions, on which the world has also only made modest progress—remains to be seen. The UAE has already set forth an ambitious COP agenda for climate finance (funds for projects aimed at addressing climate change) including doubling the funds allotted to adaptation by 2025. But even if adaptation finance increases, the funding requirements for adaptation at large remain daunting, with the developing world needing an estimated $160 billion to $340 billion annually by 2030 to fund local adaptation projects including water management, resilient road maintenance, and food security programs. Yet to date, the flow of international funds to adaptation has remained paltry, valued at less than $50 billion—less than ten percent of the money currently spent on climate as a whole. And what is earmarked for adaptation comes almost entirely from governments, largely in the form of debt, further stressing the meager finances of cash-strapped countries. But money alone will not prepare communities for weather of historic extremes.

A RISING TIDE

Effective adaptation agendas need to go beyond seeking financing to outlining how to reduce devastation. The past summer has demonstrated that there are a few key areas that demand urgent attention—and for which effective adaptation strategies would go a long way in building resilience to extreme climate events.

First, governments should build up early warning systems. The statistics speak for themselves: just 24 hours’ notice of a coming disaster can result in 30 percent less damage. Early warning and improved forecasting save lives, as Bangladesh has shown. When Cyclone Bhola hit present-day Bangladesh in 1970, up to half a million people lost their lives. In the past five decades, Bangladesh has created an early warning system consisting of improved meteorological forecasts, widespread communication efforts and impending storm updates, and a system of cyclone shelters, including some that double as schools. These measures have reduced cyclone-related deaths by over a hundredfold. Investments in more accurate forecasting could likewise reduce heat-related deaths. At COP27, the UN started to address the challenge by launching an early warning initiative calling for an investment of $3.1 billion from 2023 to 2027. The UN can build on its previous work at COP28 by ensuring timely implementation of warning systems and expansion of meteorological services worldwide with a particular focus on Africa, which lags far behind in forecasting capabilities.

Second, countries should work to enhance cross-border response capabilities. Climate-related disasters are often international, making coordinated disaster response essential. Neighboring governments have already proved willing to collaborate in the event of a crisis; when flooding devastated Slovenia in early August, amounting to the country’s worst-ever natural disaster, France and Germany sent materials including prefabricated bridges to aid the Slovenian response. Similarly, the EU sent firefighting planes to Cyprus as it was being ravaged by wildfires, and Greece shared flame retardant. NATO has also set a good example, taking the lead on institutionalizing cross-border cooperation for disaster response in the face of growing climate risk that could affect member states’ security. In 2022, it deployed 40 aircraft, including firefighting planes and helicopters, to suppress fires in Greece, and this year it established a center for climate change and security to refine response strategies in Montreal, Canada. But thus far, such cross-border efforts have been piecemeal, and more coordination is needed to ensure that adequate supplies, personnel, and knowledge are shared.

Never has the destructive force of climate change revealed itself so widely across the globe.

Third, policymakers must commit to closing the insurance protection gap: the difference between what needs to be insured against climate disasters and what is actually covered. Of the $360 billion in global losses caused by extreme weather in 2022, insurance covered only 39 percent. That means the bulk of losses had to be absorbed by individuals, governments, and philanthropies rather than insurance companies, putting the onus of recovery on the public sector and straining community resources. Insurance payouts speed recovery and relieve families of having to make devastating choices in the wake of major natural disasters, such as pulling children out of school to put them to work or selling precious assets such as seed and livestock to relieve economic duress.

Promising insurance solutions bankrolled by philanthropy and government aid are beginning to emerge around the world. These innovations include establishing regional risk pools in the Caribbean and Africa and low-cost heat insurance for women in India to make up for wages lost when searing temperatures make work impossible. States must build on these innovative insurance policies as climate risk evolves. Policymakers could, for instance, expand the availability of policies that provide money in advance of a storm so that people can invest in flood protections or that offer incentives for investments in reducing community-wide disaster risk, such as making homes more fire resistant.

The United States faces a particularly acute insurance challenge. Over the past few years, many property insurers have withdrawn coverage in areas that are more prone to climate-fueled disasters, such as California and the Gulf Coast. As homeowners’ insurance coverage shrinks, demands for the U.S. government to step in will grow. There is a precedent for the U.S. government to intervene in the disaster insurance market; over 50 years ago, after private insurance pulled out of the flood insurance markets following massive flooding along the Mississippi River, the federal government created the National Flood Insurance Program, an initiative that continues to operate heavily in the red. Today, the U.S. government can improve on such programs by establishing a commission to identify ways to ensure adequate insurance coverage at a price people can afford. This commission could also look to other examples of national disaster insurance programs, such as France’s so-called Nat Cat scheme, which guarantees all French citizens compensation for damage caused by natural disasters.

Money alone will not prepare communities for weather of historic extremes.

Fourth, governments must shift the paradigm for natural disasters to prioritize risk reduction over disaster recovery. By requiring structures to be more durable, local and national governments can help people get back to their lives faster once disaster strikes. In the United States, for instance, for every dollar spent on stronger building codes, $11 is saved in disaster recovery costs. Conversely, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, wildfire-prone countries spend up to six times more on fighting wildfires than on reducing their risk before they occur. As wildfires driven by climate change grow bigger and hotter, prevention, rather than recovery, will become more critical. One way to drive greater investment in proactive measures would be to tie risk reduction efforts to federal dollars. For example, the United States could adopt something akin to a disaster deductible—meaning that communities that fail to invest in risk reduction by permitting development in flood-prone or fire-prone areas would receive less post-disaster government assistance than those who sought to reduce risk ahead of time with improved land use and building practices.

Fifth, countries must collaboratively invest in enhancing global food security, which is increasingly threatened by extreme weather. About 42 percent of the world’s calories come from rice, wheat, and corn. Yields of these crops will likely fall as temperatures rise and extreme events become more frequent, such as the flooding in Pakistan in 2022 that left a third of the nation underwater, wrecking its rice and cotton crops. To shore up its defenses against widespread hunger, the world could increase investments in the development and distribution of climate-resilient seeds and less water-intensive crops. States must also work to diversify supply chains, to ensure that if one agricultural hub suffers, alternative sources of food are available. States have an added incentive to address food security, as doing so would likely enhance overall security; as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it, “If we don’t feed people, we feed conflict.”

FACING DOWN DISASTER

As negotiators prepare for COP28, they face a world that is backsliding from the Paris agreement—and the goal of keeping heating below 1.5 degrees Celsius. At the 2023 meeting of the G-20, a group of the world’s 20 largest economies, negotiations stalled regarding commitments to reduce fossil fuel use and triple renewable energy by 2030. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies have backpedaled from earlier commitments to reduce emissions in the wake of record profits earned during the war in Ukraine, which has renewed focus on energy security. According to the International Energy Agency, in recent years less than five percent of fossil fuel companies’ exploration and production investments have gone to low-emission energy sources. But this year, these corporations will spend more than $500 billion on developing new oil and gas supplies. China, the world’s largest emitter, is now building six times more coal capacity than the rest of the world combined. The IEA predicted that this year will likely come near the annual global record for coal consumption set last year. Meanwhile, scientists in Hawaii recorded a sad milestone in May, measuring 424 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, the highest concentration ever detected since records began.

Efforts to contain the warming of the planet should always take center stage at international climate negotiations, including COP28. Reducing harmful pollution is the only way to avoid the worst climate impacts. But negotiators must expand the stage to include adaptation and make sure that these two approaches truly go hand in hand. The impacts of a changing climate are already here, and they are devastating communities around the world. There are certain disasters that the planet can no longer avoid; only by preparing for the worst, as well as working against it, can humanity keep itself safe.