The crucial first step in preparing for a climate disaster

When your phone makes that discordant shrill noise and a disaster alert pops up, do you know what to do? Do you have a go bag? Do you have a place to crash for a few days? Do you have a way to get there? What about your kids or your pets? And if your home’s roof gets ripped off while you’re away, do you have enough cash to fix it? Have you thought about moving entirely? For millions of Americans, these are not hypothetical concerns. It’s already been a dangerous, deadly year of tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods across the United States. At this point, such extraordinary disasters are hardly a surprise. Extreme weather events are becoming more common, dangerous, and destructive. Rising average temperatures are lifting sea levels, increasing the volume of rainfall, and making heat waves more common. At the same time, more people are living in places vulnerable to hazards like coastal floods and wildfires. The good news is that, in general, natural disasters are killing fewer people. Humans are adapting with better infrastructure, better forecasting, better warnings, and better responses in the aftermath. These advances required people to take these risks seriously: to invest in upgrading structures, to spend years conducting research, and when a siren sounds or when an alert goes out, to seek shelter. Even in disaster-prone regions, though, complacency can set in. Memories of past calamities can fade quickly, while financial and policy incentives can push people to rebuild in vulnerable areas or degrade natural protections against threats. Even when a major storm is on the horizon, there are always some people who decide to stay put. Hurricane Ian in 2022 was one of the deadliest storms in US history, and most of the casualties were people who chose not to evacuate. Residents cited a variety of reasons: it’s too expensive to leave, the logistics are too complicated, or that past warnings didn’t materialize. --- One surprising thing In Germany, the term “Hochwasserdemenz,” or flood dementia, describes how quickly even people who were directly harmed by floods go back to behaving as though the floods never happened. --- Most people exist on the opposite end of the spectrum from doomsday preppers who do things like build bunkers and underground food storage. The majority of us haven’t reckoned with the reality of climate disasters impacting us at all. And all too often, despite all evidence to the contrary, people adopt a mentality that bad things won’t happen to them. Some of the riskiest regions in the country are seeing the biggest population expansions and building booms. Unfortunately, bad things can happen to you — to all of us — as climate change expands the range of places that can flood or burn. That means a growing number of people are facing risks they have never encountered before, and that means they’ll have to develop the foresight to prepare for them. The goal is not to catastrophize and live in fear but to take meaningful steps to reduce the harm from looming threats, before, during, and after they occur. Otherwise, the fragile progress in saving lives from disasters will come undone and many of us will end up in harm’s way. Why it’s hard to remember lessons from past disasters The history of natural disasters shows that people extrapolate to future events and take steps to reduce their harm, at least for a little while. Hurricane Andrew, at the time the costliest storm to ever make landfall in the US, spurred a new generation of building codes and regulations to make Florida homes more resilient to wind and floods. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, now the costliest storm, insurance companies raised their rates, yet there was a big uptick in people buying flood insurance for their homes in the region and further away. People can recognize that risks are changing too. After a big tornado outbreak in December 2021, people in the affected areas began to voice that they saw that tornado patterns have changed over time and their region was now more vulnerable than in the past. “I was surprised that they had put that together,” said Kim Klockow McClain, a social scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research supporting the National Weather Service. “They took this event that happened to them or happened near them and communities near them and they connected it to this broader environmental change.” But the salience of a disaster can fade away quickly. A pattern has emerged showing that after an increase in flood insurance purchases after a hurricane, many people gradually let their policies lapse due to cost or a diminishing concern as years pass between major storms. One analysis found that the bump can fade away in as little as three years. In addition to disaster dementia, there’s also the issue of our own luck. One of the stranger phenomena is what happens to people who barely avoid getting their home knocked down, flooded, or burned. Some people who avoid disaster will take precautionary measures similar to those who were directly in the path of destruction, but numerous studies have found that a near-miss can also create a perception that someone is less vulnerable or an extreme event is less dangerous. There are a number of variables influencing these beliefs. One study shows that the more financial flexibility someone has, the more they worry about a future disaster after a near-miss. In addition, if a disaster forecast or warning doesn’t pan out, that can make people less likely to act on future alerts. These perceptions in turn influence how much money people are willing to pay to protect themselves and how much they’ll invest to protect their communities from future devastation. Additionally, a lower perception of risk makes it less likely that someone will seek shelter or evacuate when water, wind, or flames (or all three, as in the case of recent Hurricane Beryl) are barreling down. It’s also hard for people to respond to disasters even when they do recognize that threats are mounting. Insurance payouts often only cover restoring a property to the way it was, not to upgrade it to withstand more devastating events in the future. Changes in flood and fire risk maps can make it much harder to sell a home or buy an insurance policy, so people with few resources can end up trapped in riskier homes, even though they do want to protect themselves better or leave permanently. All this adds up to an alarming number of people who can’t act, don’t think, or don’t realize that they could suffer a blow from a major disaster. So how do you “scare” people without scaring them? While many natural disasters move quickly, the process of getting people to take them more seriously takes years. Disaster responders and public officials need to be proactive about educating the public about the evolving and growing threats. In a place like Florida, which always has a large number of new arrivals who may not be familiar with what they should do during a tropical storm, this education effort needs to be constant, explained Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor of public policy at the University of Central Florida who studies disaster responses. The goal, according to Sadiq, is to create a “culture of preparedness.” That’s where everyone from individual residents to neighborhood groups, to first responders, to city officials, to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) all have rehearsed coherent plans to deal with a looming disaster. Children learn in school to head into basements when tornado sirens sound, families map out evacuation routes, utilities put additional line crews on standby to fix power outages, and so on. Creating this culture doesn’t just hinge on how people perceive their own risks; it also depends on how much confidence they have in the people in charge. “I think the trust in the government or the authority that issues that evacuation plan is very, very critical,” Sadiq said. “If I don’t trust FEMA and them telling me ‘you need to evacuate your local community,’ I’m probably not going to heed that advice.” How authorities convey risks and alerts is critical as well. Too many false alarms can inure people to warnings and render alarms less effective when a disaster does occur. Risk assessments that use jargon or overwhelm readers with data can make it hard for ordinary people to parse their exposure to hazards. One way to improve disaster responses is to work through local officials and institutions that already have credibility and lines of communication open in their communities. The messaging around a looming or ongoing threat also has to account for the fact that some of the most vulnerable people have the hardest time getting information and preparing accordingly. For instance, language barriers can arise for residents in risky areas. Some might not have any place to go during an evacuation and others may not be able to physically leave without assistance. Making sure all of these people are safe during the next major hurricane or wildfire requires a granular and tailored disaster response plan. “If we leave people behind, it’s a failure,” Sadiq said. With rising sea levels and more frequent, intense weather extremes, all these plans will need to be redesigned on a regular basis to account for the mounting risks. It will take some creativity to introduce people to threats they’ve never personally experienced before. One idea is to develop visualization and real-world interactives like markers on buildings that show how high storm surge can reach or monuments showing the boundaries of potential future wildfire zones. At this point, some increase in warming and the related extreme weather is baked in, but the destructive potential and human tolls are not. That makes it all the more urgent to take steps now — improve forecasts, expand early warning systems, adapt infrastructure — to reduce the harm from disasters and save lives. But doing all this requires believing that the worst-case scenario is indeed possible and that it can be prevented.