Hurricanes Fiona and Ian show how the warming-driven cascade of disasters makes emergency response harder

First Hurricane Fiona tore through Puerto Rico, knocking power out to the entire island and threatening the fragile infrastructure still on the mend from 2017′s devastating Hurricane Maria. A week later and 1,000 miles to the northwest, another monster storm — Hurricane Ian — tore a hole through Florida, destroying entire communities and flooding large areas for days or more.

That one week on the back end of a previously tame Atlantic hurricane season left the United States picking up the pieces after back-to-back billion-dollar storms.

Increasingly, this is the reality for disaster response: Climate change is juicing the system so much and in such a variety of ways that the catastrophes are more likely to cascade or compound, either in the same location or geographically separate but rapid-fire in timing. The result is that at times, the response — and a country’s or world’s attention — simply cannot keep up.

“When you have not only the compounding events, but you also have simultaneous events across the country, then you very quickly exceed the capacity of the emergency management system,” said Alessandra Jerolleman, an associate professor of emergency management at Jacksonville State University. “In addition to what happens locally — when you have higher stress levels, resources overburdened, individual coping capacity down among the general public, all of those things happening — you also lose the ability of emergency management to scale up.”

A packed catastrophe calendar

In the 1980s, disasters hitting the U.S. that cost upward of $1 billion occurred an average of 82 days apart, according to an analysis from the nonprofit research organization Climate Central. That interval dropped to just 18 days during the five-year period between 2017 and 2021.

Take hurricanes. The storms aren’t necessarily increasing in overall frequency by all that much, but climate change is making them more damaging and expensive. Fourteen of the 15 costliest storms to hit the U.S. came this century, and that was before Ian barged headlong onto that list. In the last few decades, some of the worst storms came in pairs: A month after Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, Rita flooded parts of the Louisiana coast anew. While Puerto Rico was reeling from 2017′s Hurricane Maria, Harvey caused $125 billion of damage in Houston.

Meanwhile, western U.S. wildfire seasons have dramatically increased in severity and extent in recent years, new research shows that the country has seen the increase in heavy rainfall predicted by climate science, and heat waves everywhere have grown larger, more frequent and hotter.

Just this past summer, give or take a month or two, the world has experienced: a massive heat wave across India and Pakistan; record-setting early-season Alaskan wildfires; heat waves across Europe contributing to a deadly glacial collapse in Italy as well as wildfires in Spain, Portugal, France, Greece and elsewhere; unprecedented flooding in eastern Kentucky; more record rainfall and deadly flooding in Seoul, South Korea; a drought-flood one-two punch in Dallas; a Middle East heat wave that approached thresholds of unlivability; calamitous flooding across much of Pakistan; and Hurricanes Fiona and Ian, separated by only a week.

That’s only a partial list. By sheer temporal necessity, many of these sorts of disasters will increasingly occur on top of each other. When that happens within a given country or region, the resources needed to respond will inevitably be strained — and more so in the developing world where those resources are limited to begin with.

“These compounding or cascading disasters basically impair the ability of communities to respond,” said Susan Cutter, a geography professor at the University of South Carolina and co-director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute. “Just as they are beginning to recover from event No. 1, event No. 2 happens. And so you are, in essence, reducing the capacity every time there’s a subsequent event to such a degree, that over time, there’s no capacity whatsoever in those communities to respond.”

Cutter called Puerto Rico the “test case” for that sort of spiraling response failure to cascading disasters. “Even before Hurricane Maria, just the number of times that the island has been affected by hurricanes, by earthquakes, by heavy precipitation events, is over time affecting the entire capacity of the island,” she said. With not enough time to respond fully to one calamity before the next one strikes, there is often little way out of such a spiral.

The wildfire three-step

Some of these disasters aren’t necessarily related to each other in physical terms, beyond their climate change connection — one hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the formation of the next one. But others are fully intertwined: drought, heat waves and wildfire, in particular, are inextricably linked. They will combine more and more in places like the American West, with devastating results.

Michael Méndez, an assistant professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine, agreed that the confluence of those disasters complicates the response and in particular harms those who are already vulnerable or marginalized. Hotter temperatures can accelerate the formation of ground-level ozone, which can combine with wildfire smoke in devastating ways.

“This toxic soup of different types of air pollution affects people with respiratory illnesses, particularly low-income individuals, people of color,” he said.

When it comes to wildfires, there is also a chance that climate change pushing traditional seasons to their breaking point is having some unanticipated effects on response. For several decades, the U.S. and Australia have shared firefighting resources and personnel, as the northern and southern hemisphere countries have opposite fire seasons — but with extended seasons and a suggestion that in many places wildfire is becoming a year-round issue, that partnership is in danger.

Straining the global attention span

Beyond the local or national response, there is a question of international attention as well. In late summer, the world was horrified by scenes of flooding across Pakistan, where a climate change-addled monsoon flooded a third of the entire country, displaced millions of people, and created the potential for deadly and widespread food shortages. A month later, with other disasters such as the hurricanes in the U.S. offering a distraction, there is a chance that some aspects of the international response to the still-urgent need in Pakistan could suffer.

“We tend to treat disasters as discrete events. They start, and they stop, and we have our emergency management cycle. And if you watch media attention, it follows a very similar pattern. If you watch donations to NGOs, it follows a similar pattern,” Jerolleman said. “But the financing, the support, they follow that cycle too. They need a start, and they need an end, and they don’t do well with concurrent events. And that is the same internationally.”

Still, Cutter told Grid that some aspects of foreign aid are fairly standardized, so the media attention shifting won’t necessarily diminish the U.N. response or other official actions. But just as with domestic cascades of catastrophe, the international community does have a finite amount of money and resources to distribute.

Looking ahead, experts agree that emergency response planning needs to be better resourced and should take climate change’s potential to pile one disaster on another into account — along with the changing nature of the disasters themselves.

“It’s not just the compounding events, it is also the fact that the characteristics of the events are changing,” Jerolleman said, citing how hurricanes are increasingly able to intensify more rapidly as the climate warms. “A lot of our planning assumptions for things like evacuation assume that we have longer than we do. It’s not only events on top of events, it’s also the fact that our actual plans don’t work as well.”

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.