Wild Fires are a Demonstration that Disaster Frequency is the New Normal
Disasters are up 3-5 times compared with 25-50 years ago.
I wanted to write about climate change, so I made a section in Space Y to do it. This will only be an occasional Journal I call “Eco Touch”. While I want to write about science, space and SpaceX, somehow it feels like climate change and Mars are related.
Fair warning, I’m a bit of a doomsday theorist when it comes to these things.
The increasingly inhospitable world that we have terraformed into a reflection of our own brutality.
Recently already in April, forest fire season has “come early”. There’s no easy way to put this, but in some areas now “Fire season” is a year-around affair (think Arizona and New Mexico).
You have a dry winter
You have a windy spring
That’s the recipe for an inferno summer
So weirdly those early US wildfires signal more spring infernos to come, the problem is this means Disasters are now just more common place. While in the news we can see this in the U.S., in reality its everywhere from Nepal to Greece.
This “disaster” frequency also impacts our mental health, for instance it impacts the cohort of GenZ to a marked degree. It impacts how we see our future, what states we want to move to, how we envision owning a home one day.
Arizona, 2021.
The Future We Didn’t Wish for our Children
Catastrophe has become more commonplace, according to data from a new United Nations report. Not only that, but humans are largely responsible for the increasing number of disasters, which are only going to become even more frequent, the report warns.
It’s not just forest fires, in April it manifests as quickly spreading grass fires as well.
We live on one planet, we are interconnected and yet all more vulnerable to increasing natural disasters are climate change events synthetically created by man.
In today’s crowded and interconnected world, disaster impacts increasingly cascade across geographies and sectors. Despite progress, risk creation is outstripping risk reduction.
The Rise of Synthetic Natural Disasters
You can visualize how synthetic national disasters are the new normal.
Looking back, from 1970 to 2000, the world averaged between 90 and 100 disasters reported per year, according to the report published today by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). That grew tremendously from 2001 to 2020, to between 350 to 500 disasters a year.
This 3 to 5 fold increase is dangerous, since its impacts are unpredictable.
Weirdly it’s as if the economic cost of this hasn’t quite dawned on most countries or global leaders, business leaders, politicians and policy makers.
Risk creation is outstripping risk reduction. Disasters, economic loss and the underlying vulnerabilities that drive risk, such as poverty and inequality, are increasing just as ecosystems and biospheres are at risk of collapse. Global systems are becoming more connected and therefore more vulnerable in an uncertain risk landscape.
It’s very World Economic Forum-eque. Nature is kicking our butt and it’s disasters on a warming planet could even become more frequent in the decades ahead. Forest and grass fires have a biblical ability to reduce communities to ashes.
There’s a science to how disasters and economics interest and set off cascade impacts on vulnerable people.
As we face food shortage in the near future, this will become way more apparent.
As politicians in China err on the side of caution and ideology the Chinese lockdowns and shutdowns of 2022 will forever change how ex-pats think of living and working in China.
A Globalization of Increasing Disasters
We can wage war, push sanctions and worry about national boundaries, history and rivalry. But as we are doing this, the real world is becoming less safe.
That includes disasters caused by hazards like earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, extreme weather, crop plagues, epidemics, and more (the UN counted biological, geophysical, and weather disasters). The UN excluded what it considers “small-scale” disasters that only affect local communities without requiring national or international aid.
Our economic and political systems become more fragile in a world of constant “disaster management”.
Miami is becoming the crypto capital of the U.S., the same part of Florida that not so long from now will be under-water. There’s a major disconnect between our political lives and the actual geographies and environments we inhabit.
The best defense against systemic risk is to transform systems to make them more resilient. Robotics, drones and A.I. systems could help predict them and reduce the risk for people and enable more safe evacuations.
“At no other point in modern history has humankind faced such an array of familiar and unfamiliar risks and hazards, interacting in a hyperconnected and rapidly changing world,” the report says.
Human activity has raised the stakes of these disasters, the report points out. This is why I call them Synthetic Natural disasters, it didn’t have to be this way.
A hazard like an earthquake or a flood only becomes disastrous when people or a community are harmed. But when it’s people that caused the conditions for which disaster frequency is up to five times more common, one has to wonder at the karmic cycle of the universe.
Floods and droughts have made people go extinct before, banished entire communities to history. We know this as our paleontology improves.
As climate migrants becomes a more common occurrence, it will also sow political chaos and increase geopolitical instability. Disasters at scale create displaced vulnerable world citizens.
Climate Dystopia Is going to be a Reality
Our Synthetic ability to bring destruction, genocide, biodiversity extinction where we go also means we are a menace to ourselves. Human-driven climate change has also made nature’s wrath more powerful.
I don’t know what the solution is, but climate change bringing more disasters is leading to climate dystopia.
We’re also making ourselves more vulnerable to climate dystopia. The costs of disasters are felt across almost all areas of sustainable development. As the world urbanizes, risk is being concentrated in densely populated areas, many of which are not designed to withstand their current levels of hazard exposure, let alone those anticipated as a result of climate change.
The Signs of Systemic Instability
This cascade effect occurs in weird and brutal ways. For instance, research shows that violence against women and girls increases in the aftermath of disasters. Just as the UN noticed that vulnerable migrants from the U.K. fleeing war in their homeland were also more vulnerable to sexual assault. Disasters and geopolitical conflict brings out the baser predatory instincts in some of us.
Hastening economic inequality is accelerating just as we are getting closer to climate dystopia which impacts the mental health of GenZ as a whole, as they inherit such a world falling prey to both economic and climate change corruption.
Forest and grass fires are a symptom of a world in a state of imbalance. Even from a functional, insurance, legal and policy level there has to be more accountability. Governments and the financial industry urgently need to improve how they account for the extent of financial assets at risk under various future climate change scenarios.
The acceleration of Synthetic disasters and systemic instability increase as we get further along the spectrum: (two very easy to visualize things are as follows)
Hotter global temperatures have made heatwaves and wildfire seasons more intense, for instance. Disasters have led to more deaths in the past five years than in the previous five, as a result.
Without changes on the part of humanity, 2030 could be even bleaker. Disasters related to extreme temperatures, for example, could triple in frequency compared to 2001.
Everything from permafrost melt to our oceans dying present uniquely new problems. The UN report projects the number of disasters to rise to around 560 annually, or about 1.5 disasters a day. A natural disaster will soon be as common as a mass-shooting in America, both were preventable, both depict a world moving into a new normal that’s increasingly dangerous.
How will we do with more air pollution and a noticeable reduction in humanity fertility by 2030? How will we manage 1.5 disasters a day by 2030? The future is no longer so far away and dystopia is knocking to check up on the sins of our ancestors as manifested in the world we live in today. It didn’t have to be this way.