Category: Disaster risk reduction
-
Cascading Hazards and What They Mean for Infrastructure and Safety
Natural hazards rarely occur in isolation. A single event, such as an earthquake, can trigger secondary hazards like landslides or tsunamis, creating a cascading effect. Similarly, hazards like heatwaves and wildfires often compound, amplifying their impacts. Ignoring these interconnections can lead to underestimating risks, jeopardizing infrastructure, and endangering lives. This project has meticulously analyzed seven…
-
Strengthening Early Warning Systems for Global Climate Resilience
The Hydromet Gap Report 2024, produced by the Alliance for Hydromet Development, summarized critical gaps we must urgently address. It reveals that many NMHS in the developing world face severe resource constraints, knowledge gaps, outdated infrastructure, and limited data sharing – hampering their ability to deliver the early warnings and climate services communities need. For…
-
Urban Subsidence as a Growing Global Climate and Development Risk
In recent years, we have seen alarming rates of subsidence in major cities around the world. From Jakarta to Mexico City, from Venice to Shanghai, the ground beneath millions of people is literally sinking. In China alone, a systematic assessment using spaceborne synthetic aperture radar interferometry has revealed that almost half of the urban land…
-
A Decade of Building Climate Resilience in Somalia Through Early Warning Systems
Reflecting on my engagement in Somalia over the past decade, it’s been a profoundly transformative journey. My involvement began with supporting the establishment of their hydrometeorological working group, which was a foundational step towards enhancing the nation’s capacity to understand and respond to climate variability. The subsequent development of a multi-hazard early warning centre marked…
-
The Brown Ocean Effect: How Warm, Wet Land Is Re-Energizing Cyclones
Cyclones typically lose power once they move over land. However, new research shows that if the storm passes over warm, soaked ground, the moisture and heat from the soil can re-energize the hurricane. This mimics the way that the warm ocean usually fuels the storms. As climate change increases extreme weather events, understanding this phenomenon…
-
The Escalating Threat of Flash Droughts
The graph shows that the risk of flash droughts is increasing in every region of the world. The black line shows historical data, and the three colored lines show three different possible future scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions. The shaded regions indicate the variability among the averages between all six models for each scenario. As…
-
Urgent Action for Tropical Forests and Climate Resilience
In the 19th century, scientists discovered that plant leaves could survive temperatures of up to 50° Celsius, but beyond this threshold, they perished. Fast forward to 2021, a study of 147 tropical plant species found that the average temperature beyond which photosynthesis failed was 46.7°. This is the heartbeat of our planet, the rhythm of…
-
The Brown Ocean Effect: How Soil Moisture Re-energizes Cyclones
Cyclones typically lose power once they move over land. However, new research shows that if the storm passes over warm, soaked ground, the moisture and heat from the soil can re-energize the hurricane. This mimics the way that the warm ocean usually fuels the storms. As climate change increases extreme weather events, understanding this phenomenon…
-
Are we there yet? The transition from response to recovery for the COVID-19 pandemic
Disaster risk reduction
Bapon (SHM) Fakhruddin, PhD 