Disasters so extreme that communities have not experienced anything like them before show the shortcomings of current preparedness plans
After dozens of people were killed by flooding in the central United States over the past week, the question looms: How can communities better prepare for the next time?A new study warns that unprecedented events — disasters so extreme that communities haven’t experienced anything like them before — are stymieing attempts to prepare for them. Risk management strategies based on past climate norms are no longer effective for a more extreme future.
The researchers found that implementing risk management strategies improved outcomes the second time around. The exception was when the second event was significantly more severe than the first, exposing the community to threats it hadn’t experienced before.For instance, Cape Town, South Africa, suffered a severe drought in 2003 and 2004.
It happens with extreme floods, too, the research notes. Heavy rainfall and flash floods overwhelmed the sewer systems in the Swedish city of Malmö in 2014, despite attempts to prepare after an earlier, but less severe, flooding event just a few years prior. Altogether, the researchers found only two examples in which risk management strategies reduced the impact of a second disaster, even when it was far more extreme than the first. These included floods in Germany and Austria in 2013 and floods in Barcelona in 2018.
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