Industrial-sized confinement farming systems pose massive challenges during hurricanes, floods or wildfires, including significant public health, animal welfare and socio-economic implications.
Members of the RCMP return from a boat patrol of a flooded neighbourhood in High River, Alta., on July 4, 2013.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Food supply chains had already taken a serious hit by panic-purchasing during the COVID-19 pandemic. The B.C. floods remind us how effective supply chain management planning can help avert crises.
Compound climate disasters are likely to become more common as the Earth warms.
Wildfire smoke contains a mixture of toxic pollutants that can be harmful to both the lungs and the brain.
Bloomberg Creative/ Bloomberg Creative Photos via Getty Images
Pollution from more frequent floods and wildfires – exacerbated by the warming climate – is threatening human health and poses particular risks to the brain.
The aftermath of the 2021 earthquake in Haiti.
EPA-EFE/ORLANDO BARRIA
The picture seems hopeless, but with mitigation and adaptation strategies and policies driven through COP26, southern Africa can reduce the impacts of climate change on local livelihoods.
A firefighter checks homes after a mudslide that killed 23 people in Montecito, Calif., in 2018.
Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Studies show climate change is raising the risk of cascading hazards that alone might not be extreme but add up to human disasters. Communities and government agencies aren’t prepared.
Melizabeth Uhi, a school principal, stands in front of her destroyed home in Vanuatu, a week after Cyclone Pam tore through the South Pacific archipelago in 2015.
Nick Perry/AP
As climate change amplifies the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, evacuations are likely to become increasingly common and costly – in human and economic terms.
Arctic peatland in the Mackenzie Valley. A quarter of all global peatland carbon is found in Canada.
(Ed Struzik)
Peatlands play an outsized role in filtering water and mitigating floods, drought and wildfire — and they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests.
The aftermath of Hurricane Ida in Barataria, Louisiana, US.
EPA-EFE/Dan Anderson
There’s evidence that people who have been through multiple disasters experience poorer mental and physical health compared to people who have been exposed to a single disaster.
Underground and underwater.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images via Getty Images
Images of water gushing into subway stations filled social media following heavy rain in New York City. Solutions are at hand – but it takes money and political will, an expert explains.
Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina.
(Hilary Scheinuk/AP Pool)
Sixteen years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the Category 4 storm Hurricane Ida reached Louisiana. Planning for future hurricanes must include the need to build resiliency to climate change.
New research also identified steps people wished they’d taken to prepare for disaster, such as protecting sentimental items, planning a meeting place and better managing stress.
Academic research can shed light on crucial questions about what life on Earth will be like under the most plausible emissions scenarios. And a warning: the answers are confronting.
Drones are increasingly being used in disaster management.
(Shutterstock)