2022 has been Australia’s year of freak floods. Here’s what stricken Victorians are set to experience in the weeks and months ahead.
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Articles on Disaster preparedness
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Framing floods as ‘natural disasters’ deflects from the reality that vulnerability must exist before a crisis can emerge.
As recent deluges in St. Louis and Kentucky show, flash flooding can happen in urban and rural areas, with deadly results in either setting.
Simply providing passive information is not enough. Governments must find better ways to deliver important messages about natural hazards.
Parts of southeast Australia are inundated yet again. Clearly, short-term weather forecasts are not enough to protect communities in times like these.
We can’t prevent natural disasters from happening, but we can be better prepared for when they do.
When researchers look at CCTV footage of how people really react during earthquakes – as opposed to what they report after the fact – it looks like alerts aren’t yet inspiring protective action.
Politicians have more incentive to react to current climate disasters, but more investment is needed in preparing for future problems.
Failures to respond adequately to the floods that hit Germany and Luxembourg in July 2021 must teach us how to prepare for future climate disasters.
While neoliberalism has allowed U.S. markets to grow, the resultant stunted public health system left Americans to figure out how to protect themselves from COVID-19 and its fallout on their own.
Australia has expansive areas of flat land — usually agricultural land — and it’s over these large, flat areas that tornadoes like to form.
Some of the worst risks of earthquakes are in a zone running from the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River that includes major cities like Toronto, Ottawa and Québec City.
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.
Mitigating climate change is more politically popular than adapting to its inevitable effects.
Federal weather scientists are pushing to make the US more ‘weather-ready,’ which could mean prepping for fires, flooding or storms depending on where you live. The common factor: thinking ahead.
New Zealand’s Alpine Fault has ruptured in a major earthquake on average every 250 years. New research shows a 75% chance of the next one within 50 years, and it’s likely to be magnitude 8 or more.
Our report draws on data from more than 1,000 participants who told us of their experiences through community meetings, repeated surveys years after the fires or in-depth interviews.
Unless you’ve lived through it, it’s hard to understand how stressful a catastrophic flood can be - both in the moment and long after the event. That’s especially true for vulnerable populations.
With the onset of spring come thunderstorms, and sometimes tornadoes. Learn how these systems form and why night tornadoes are especially deadly.
There will be more weather-driven disasters like February’s deep freeze in Texas, and energy planners aren’t prepared.
Top contributors
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Professor Emeritus of Geography, Louisiana State University
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Professor of Disasters and Health, UCL
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Associate Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee
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Assistant Professor of Geography, Middle Tennessee State University
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Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics and Director of the PECC Lab, Royal Holloway University of London
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Honorary Fellow, Child and Community Wellbeing Unit, Beyond Bushfires Research Program, The University of Melbourne
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Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, Honorary Adjunct Research Fellow, Western Sydney University
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Academic, Population Health, The University of Melbourne
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Senior Lecturer, University of Southern Queensland
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Director of Koi Tū, the Centre for Informed Futures; former Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand, University of Auckland
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Research Associate, Institute of the Americas, UCL
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Michael Howes is a Friend of The Conversation.
Associate Professor, Griffith University
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Honorary Professor of Hazards and Disaster Risk Sciences, University of Sydney
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Associate Professor, University of Sydney
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Research Associate, Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience, Department of Geography, Durham University
