Quoting from that article:
“The true cost in lives and economic losses won’t be clear for some time. But research examining past years reveal the steep price of global warming in general. More than 61,000 people are estimated to have died in Europe alone because of heat waves in 2022. In Africa, climate change has led to more hunger, malaria, dengue fever and flooding, Mr. Taalas said.
“ More intense, concentrated bursts of rainfall are one effect of climate change. In September, a powerful storm dumped torrential rain over the Mediterranean, rupturing two dams in Libya and killing thousands in the city of Derna. Earlier in the year, the exceptionally long-lived Tropical Cyclone Freddy hit southern Africa, forming in early February and making final landfall in Mozambique and Malawi in mid-March. The storm killed more than 600 and displaced more than 600,000 in Malawi.
“Another intense storm, Tropical Cyclone Mocha, hit Southeast Asia in May. The cyclone displaced more than 1 million people, including many Rohingya refugees who had already been displaced once from Myanmar and were living in the world’s largest refugee camp, Cox’s Bazar, in Bangladesh.
“In less dire circumstances, high temperatures prevent people from working as many hours as they would normally. One study estimated that, in 2021, the United States agriculture, construction, manufacturing and service sectors lost more than 2.5 billion labor hours to heat exposure. A separate assessment found that, in 2020, productivity losses from extreme heat cost the American economy about $100 billion.”
Sixty thousand people dying in Europe alone due to heat — I guess you could call that the silent killer. Other studies and records of deaths here in the U.S. verified that deaths go way up during heat emergencies. People might not die of a “heat injury,” but the heat aggravates other medical conditions, just like snowstorms tend to increase the number of people dying from heart attacks from shoveling the snow. They didn’t freeze in their homes, but the impacts from the snow had their effect.
Then there is the lost worker productivity. I always think about farm workers and construction workers. Being a roofer in the Southwest in the summer has to be a potentially deadly occupation.
As I shared just last week in a Seattle Times op-ed, “Surviving future disaster depends on how we plan and build today,” our efforts at climate adaptation will not eliminate the impacts of climate change, but we can at least attenuate their impacts by making wise decisions on new buildings and infrastructure. Another “for instance” is planning for more rainfall by installing larger culverts than we have in the past.
Many times these smaller efforts can add up to have an impact beyond the singular event or action. If we are not going to make significant impact on carbon reduction, then emergency managers have to step up our efforts to mitigate climate impacts.
