By Mihir Mysore, Tim Ward, and Tom Dohrmann and David Bibo

Weather and climate disasters are becoming more frequent, wide-ranging, severe, and costly. While consequences for life and health are always at the forefront, one way to measure disaster impact is through estimates of economic impacts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that from 2019 to 2023, the U.S. experienced more than 100 $1 billion disasters, with total costs in excess of $0.5 trillion. This is four times the average number of $1 billion disasters and more than double the costs of any other five-year period since 2000. In 2023 alone, there were 28 $1 billion disasters, the highest number recorded since 1980 (when data became available). And these disasters affected 46 states, almost twice the number of states affected by $1 billion disasters in 2000. Indeed, the number of states experiencing $1 billion disasters has steadily risen year over year since 2000.

More and worsening disasters across a broader swath of the country means more lives and livelihoods placed in harm’s way and more communities likely facing intertwined economic and social consequences. Given current trends, state and local leaders are seeking ways to help their communities recover and rebuild effectively in the wake of disaster, restoring not only infrastructure and homes but economic competitiveness and social well-being. To help inform state and local recovery planning efforts, we examined quantitative and anecdotal evidence from U.S. communities that have demonstrated robust resilience in the face of disasters—what we termed leading recoveries—as well as for communities that experienced lower resilience where we saw lagging recoveries.

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs | September 2024

By: Roy E. Wright, Jeff Byard, Craig Colten, Tracey Kijewski-Correa, J. Marshall Shepard, James M. Shultz, Chauncia Willis-Johnson

Experiencing a single disaster - a hurricane, tornado, flood, severe winter storm, or a global pandemic - can wreak havoc on the lives and livelihoods of individuals, families, communities and entire regions. For many people who live in communities in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico region, the reality of disaster is starker. Endemic socioeconomic and health disparities have made many living in Gulf of Mexico communities particularly vulnerable to the effects of weather-climate hazards. Prolonged disaster recovery and increasing disaster risk is an enduring reality for many living in Gulf of Mexico communities. Between 2020 and 2021, seven major hurricanes and a severe winter storm affected communities across the region. As a backdrop to these acute weather events, the global COVID-19 pandemic was unfolding, producing a complex and unprecedented public health and socioeconomic crisis.

Traditionally, the impacts of disasters are quantified individually and often in economic terms of property damage and loss. In this case, each of these major events occurring in the Gulf of Mexico during this time period subsequently earned the moniker of "billion-dollar" disaster. However, this characterization does not reflect the non-financial human toll and disparate effects caused by multiple disruptive events that increase underlying physical and social vulnerabilities, reduce adaptive capacities and ultimately make communities more sensitive to the effects of future disruptive events. This report explores the interconnections, impacts, and lessons learned of compounding disasters that impair resilience, response, and recovery efforts. While Compounding Disasters in Gulf Coast Communities, 2020-2021 focuses on the Gulf of Mexico region, its findings apply to any region that has similar vulnerabilities and that is frequently at risk for disasters.

National Academies Press, 2024

By Megan Lowry

Today, communities across Louisiana and Southeastern coasts are emerging from the shadow of Hurricane Ida. The storm has left New Orleans without power, surrounding areas flooded, and thousands evacuated from their homes.

Since Hurricane Katrina swept through Louisiana almost exactly 16 years ago, the National Academies have helped produce scientific insights and recommendations through initiatives such as the Resilient America Program to help policymakers avoid the worst impacts of future disasters — addressing questions like: How can we improve hurricane prediction? How can cities and states better manage evacuations? How can we make sure the electrical grid is ready for increasingly intense storms?

August 31, 2021; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

By: Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience

This handbook companion document supports Public Information and Warnings (AIDR 2021) and provides guidance on the elements of the Australian Warning System.

The role of warnings in a public information and warning context is to provide point-in-time information about a hazard that is impacting or is expected to impact communities. It describes the impact and expected consequences for communities and includes advice on what people should do.

Previously, there have been different warning systems for different hazard types across Australia. The Australian Warning System was adopted by ANZEMC in March 2021 and aims to provide a consistent warnings approach to Australian communities.

The system is a three-level scaled warning system and includes a nationally consistent set of hazard icons for each warning level to show warnings on various publishing platforms (e.g. websites and apps) and provides calls to action. There are icons for cyclone, bushfire, flood, extreme heat, storm, and other. There is a consistent shape and colour scheme, with icons increasing in size as the warning level increases.

Each warning level is to be combined with an action statement to give the community clearer advice about what to do. Calls to action can be used flexibly across all three warning levels and contextualised for each hazard within each state or territory.

The system builds on existing warning frameworks and applies to bushfire, flood, severe storm, cyclone and extreme heat – but is designed to be adaptable and scalable to other hazards.

(AIDR 2021)

By: Jane Sexton, Michael Tait, Heidi Turner, Craig Arthur, David Henderson, Mark Edwards

Ask a Queenslander where tropical cyclones occur and the inevitable response will be, North Queensland. While most of the tropical cyclones have made landfall north of Bundaberg, the cascading and concurrent effects are felt much further afield. The major flooding following Tropical Cyclone Yasi in 2011 and Tropical Cyclone Debbie in 2017 are 2 examples where impacts were felt across the state, and the damage to the banana plantation following Tropical Cyclone Larry (2006) was felt nationally. Acknowledging that climate is influencing the intensity and frequency of intense severe weather hazards, understanding how tropical cyclone hazard varies under future climate conditions is critical to risk-based planning in Queensland. With this climate influence, along with increasing population and more vulnerable building design in South East Queensland (relative to northern Queensland), there is an urgent need to assess the wind risk and set in place plans to reduce the effects of a potential tropical cyclone in South East Queensland.

AJEM 38:4, October 2023, pages 33-39.

By: Ronald W. Perry, Marjorie R. Greene, and Michael K. Lindell

As a strategy for manipulating the consequences of disasters, evacuation - that is, the relocation of people from a place of high threat to a relatively safer place - has a particularly long history and constitutes a common societal adjustment to environmental hazards. The Greek historian Herodotus described the Egyptians systematic evacuations to escape the seasonal flooding of the Nile River as early as the fourth century B.C. During the Middle Ages in Europe, significant movements of populations occurred as a function of people’s attempts to escape various epidemics. The history of warfare, from the Dorian invasion of central Greece in 1130 B.C., through the Vietnam conflict of the 1970s and the recent invasion of Afghanistan, is also a history of population movements, many of which began as evacuations. Thus, evacuation has been used by many societies for centuries as an adjustment to cope with disasters.

Particularly with regard to riverine flooding, pre-impact evacuation of the threatened population is an important management strategy which may be used by authorities. Of course, evacuation is not the only, or even the “best”, means of coping with flood hazards. Other options include controlled building in flood plains and enhanced building design and construction techniques. Such measures, however, are easily incorporated into new construction and communities, but not so easy to institute in established comnites where such protections tend to be developed slowly in connection with continuous building and renovation. Thus, many communities must depend, in part or completely, upon measures other than elaborate land use planning or restrictive construction codes in their plans to adjust to floods.

Disasters, Vol.4, No.4.pp.433449