Climate change has progressed far more rapidly and with greater intensity than some thought possible. Events once thought of as once-in-a-century occurrences — urban flooding caused by torrential rain, powerful typhoons and severe droughts — have become increasingly common, while earthquakes can compound disaster risks in an aging society.
Emergency personnel and public servants know all too well the limits of what can be achieved at disaster sites. When extreme natural disasters strike simultaneously, government emergency-response resources are inevitably stretched to capacity.
Government assistance is the final line of defense, but what often makes a difference in a disaster is the ability of the public to protect themselves and the capacity of communities to assist each other in the early stages of a disaster.
To confront extreme weather, we must overturn the traditional view of disaster preparedness as something passively received, and instead incorporate it into our personal and collective approach to risk management.
Traditional disaster-preparedness campaigns tend to treat disasters as separate categories, but under extreme weather conditions, such events often occur in sequence. A sudden downpour following a drought could trigger landslides, while a typhoon after an earthquake could result in the prolonged loss of water, electricity and communications.
People need more than a rigid manual. They need the ability to continually assess risks in their surroundings, learn to interpret hazard maps and other data, and make decisive choices at critical moments about whether to shelter in place or evacuate.
Household-level resilience also needs a shift in mindset. Just as we understand the importance of risk management and asset allocation in financial planning, emergency kits and stored food should not be seen as unnecessary expenses. They are resilience assets that protect families against extreme weather. That means maintaining at least one week’s worth of essential supplies, a backup power source, backup communications and backups of important documents. By making investing in personal safety a normal part of everyday life, we can buy ourselves time for rescue when essential lifelines fail.
Building up local mutual aid capacity is also critical. When disaster strikes, disrupted transportation and communications can prevent authorities from immediately reaching every corner of a community. At such times, a community’s social capital can become its lifeline.
A community with an established mutual assistance network and knowledge of where vulnerable residents live would recover far more effectively from a disaster than an isolated and disconnected neighborhood. Bottom-up, collective resilience is the strongest support for a government’s emergency-response capacity.
We must also acknowledge that during extreme weather events, there is no such thing as a zero-risk environment. The government cannot build flood-control infrastructure that ignores physical limits, nor can it deploy an unlimited number of search-and-rescue personnel.
When the public develops a mature understanding of risk and takes responsibility for protecting themselves, the government can concentrate its most valuable emergency resources on the areas in greatest danger.
Extreme weather is our new reality. We cannot control when torrential rain will fall or the next earthquake will hit, but we can control how prepared we are.
Starting today, check your household emergency kit and familiarize yourself with evacuation routes. That is one of the most worthwhile forms of risk insurance we can buy for ourselves and our families.
Ethan Chen is an associate technical specialist.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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