> More research across disciplines is needed
Lack of research is not the bottleneck here. Having worked with a Canadian environmental non-profit on ecological impact assessment (how are natural events interconnected, how effective are our environmental efforts), the problem of natural disaster prevention is moreso a problem of political and economic will than actual science/modelling/data.
For example, there are obvious things you can do to reduce flash flooding and wildfire risk and damage, but government/taxpayers/corporations are often unwilling to take these measures since they:
- are expensive, though eventually more than make up their worth in disasters averted and scale of disaster reduced
- are not immediate fixes, since they usually involve restoring ecological health i.e. forests, rivers, ecosystems
- are not guaranteed to prevent disasters - only reduce their occurrence and severity
- generally involve reducing the "development" (sprawl) of cities and the "productivity" (unsustainable practices) of big farms
I hope this summer increases environmental disaster prevention budgets everywhere. May the Ministry of the Future wet bulb event never happen.
Lack of research is not the bottleneck here. Having worked with a Canadian environmental non-profit on ecological impact assessment (how are natural events interconnected, how effective are our environmental efforts), the problem of natural disaster prevention is moreso a problem of political and economic will than actual science/modelling/data.
For example, there are obvious things you can do to reduce flash flooding and wildfire risk and damage, but government/taxpayers/corporations are often unwilling to take these measures since they:
- are expensive, though eventually more than make up their worth in disasters averted and scale of disaster reduced
- are not immediate fixes, since they usually involve restoring ecological health i.e. forests, rivers, ecosystems
- are not guaranteed to prevent disasters - only reduce their occurrence and severity
- generally involve reducing the "development" (sprawl) of cities and the "productivity" (unsustainable practices) of big farms
I hope this summer increases environmental disaster prevention budgets everywhere. May the Ministry of the Future wet bulb event never happen.