With burgeoning populations facing ever more extreme weather patterns, mitigating the impact of natural hazards has never been more important
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Cyclones have caused more than 700,000 deaths in Bangladesh over the past 50 years. The country is particularly prone to violent storms, which are a yearly occurrence for its 170 million citizens due to its geography; the triangular Bay of Bengal acts as a funnel, driving winds towards Bangladesh’s exposed and densely populated southern coast.
When Cyclone Bhola struck East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) in 1970, it caused what’s considered to be one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters as storm surges flooded the low-lying land, killing an estimated 300,000–500,000 people.
But a lot has changed since 1970. Although the population of Bangladesh has more than doubled since Bhola landed in the Ganges Delta, and climate change is increasing both the severity and frequency of extreme-weather events, the country has managed to reduce its cyclone-related deaths more than 100-fold.
In the mid-2000s, two powerful cyclones emerged from the Bay of Bengal: Cyclone Sidr, which hit Bangladesh in November 2007, and Cyclone Nargis, which landed in Myanmar in May 2008. Both caused extensive damage, flattening homes and schools, devastating crops and cutting water and electricity supplies to towns and cities. The total number of fatalities in the two countries, however, was markedly different; it’s thought that as many as 140,000 people died in Myanmar, compared to fewer than 3,500 in Bangladesh. The main reason, according to experts working in disaster prevention? Bangladesh was prepared.
Since then, the downward trend has continued. In May 2020, Cyclone Amphan careened into the Ganges Delta with minimal loss of life – 26 fatalities were reported – and in May 2023, Cyclone Mocha caused three deaths in Bangladesh. This significant reduction in casualties is one of several examples of how countries and regions are working to mitigate the damage caused by major environmental hazards, as documented by the NASA-funded project Disasters Avoided.
Ilan Kelman, an expert in disaster risk and a professor at University College London, explains that the successful measures put in place in Bangladesh sparked the idea for the project. ‘We see so many headlines of deaths and destruction. We thought there has to be good news out there,’ he says. ‘And there is.’
In fact, he says, good news is easy to find. ‘There’s work being done on disaster mitigation all the time, so we have a long list of possibilities to investigate.’ The stories collected so far all involve a major environmental hazard – such as a tornado, earthquake, drought, wildfire, pathogen, landslide, volcanic eruption or heatwave – that didn’t lead to major casualties or disruption as a direct result of disaster prevention actions that were completed before the hazard happened. Some take place on a local level, where individuals have taken measures to fire-proof their homes; others are on a national scale. In many cases improvements still need to take place, but there are also clear signs that progress has been made.
Disasters Avoided isn’t just collecting good news stories, however. The purpose, explains Kelman, is to see what these examples have in common, what can be learned from them and how they can be replicated elsewhere. So far, the project has identified six patterns that appear again and again. The first, and perhaps the most important, is having the right mindset.
‘Everyone needs to understand that disasters are not natural,’ says Kelman. ‘They come from the choices we make, not the hazard itself, and those choices haven’t been made overnight.’ All disasters, he explains, are actually many years in the making. He points to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, where a combination of poor urban planning, political instability and widespread social injustice – which emerged over centuries of colonialism – resulted in a devastating catastrophe and loss of life.
In Bangladesh’s case, the damage caused by cyclones is exacerbated by widespread poverty, illiteracy and a lack of risk awareness among coastal communities. In Cox’s Bazar, one of the poorest and most disaster-prone districts in Bangladesh, a third of the population lives below the poverty line. The world’s largest refugee camp, Kutupalong, is located here, and tens of thousands of refugees live in closely packed temporary structures.
The low death toll of Cyclone Mocha, which made landfall near Cox’s Bazar, destroying 2,000 homes and damaging a further 10,000 in the area, is largely thanks to the inclusion of the local community in resilience planning – another key approach identified by Disasters Avoided.
Two years after Bhola struck, the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society (BDRCS) launched the Cyclone Preparedness Programme (CPP). The success of the programme comes from its simplicity; it relies on a community-based network of volunteers to disseminate cyclone-warning messages produced by the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD). Volunteers are equipped with a megaphone and a set of three red-and-black flags (one flag means a cyclone could be forming, two means it’s on its way and three means impact is imminent). Patrolling villages on foot or by bike, they can spread important information from the BMD in less than 15 minutes.
Last year, as Cyclone Mocha approached, BDRCS secretary general Kazi Shofiqul Azam announced that 76,000 CPP volunteers were well prepared to respond before, during and after the cyclone had landed. By the time it made impact, about 1.27 million people had been evacuated from Cox’s Bazar. Many were directed to the more than 12,000 cyclone shelters dispersed along Bangladesh’s coastline, which even offer areas in which farmers can shelter their animals.
Earthquakes, New Zealand
The 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck the New Zealand city of Christchurch in February 2011 killed 185 residents and reduced 80 per cent of the city to rubble. It was the second-deadliest earthquake in the country’s history. However, according to Nick Smith, New Zealand’s former building and housing minister, decades of improvements to city buildings’ seismic resistance – prompted by devastation caused by the 7.8-magnitude Napier earthquake in 1931 – prevented a much worse disaster. ‘To put it another way, there would have been about 4,000 fatalities in Christchurch were building standards left as they were in 1931.’
Kelman believes that there are good and bad lessons to be learned from the Christchurch earthquake, but that ‘the big one’ is Wellington. The city is precariously built on reclaimed land above the Wellington fault. If an earthquake were to occur, the sudden shaking could make the soil behave like a liquid (a process known as liquefaction), causing structures to sink or topple. With only a couple of roads leading in and out, the city could be cut off for up to four months. ‘It’s as if New Zealand said, “Where’s the most dangerous part of the country? Let’s put our capital there.”’ But the country is well aware of the risks, he adds. ‘They are planning to manage without a water supply for several months; they’re ready with helicopters that can respond with supplies. All in all, they are amazingly well prepared. They have the right mindset and their approach of always trying to improve is one we hope others will adopt.’
The country has also invested in early-warning monitoring systems and now collects meteorological data through a network of more than 50 weather stations, balloons and radars. The BMD, with the support of India’s Meteorological Department, was able to accurately forecast the wind speeds and the coastal landing site of Cyclone Mocha four days before it reached the shore, helping both CPP volunteers and other emergency-response agencies to prepare.
Access to accurate data is another important aspect of disaster mitigation, says Kelman, but it also helps to prove that a disaster has been avoided. ‘That can be a struggle, obviously, even when it’s a fairly clear example of a disaster avoided, because proving something didn’t happen isn’t the easiest thing to do.’ Often, there isn’t the level of detail in available data to easily compare two scenarios. There are some absolute examples, he adds, such as when a fire burns through a neighbourhood and the one house that planned for a wildfire doesn’t burn, or when the scale of damage caused by two similarly sized cyclones in the same location is vastly different.
Sometimes, however, the steps taken by governments and NGOs to reduce the risk of a disaster aren’t enough. Every 19 September, to commemorate the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that killed some 10,000 people, citizens across the city take part in a large-scale earthquake drill.
Almost 14,000 loudspeakers city-wide blare out an alarm and emergency alerts pop up on every smartphone, informing residents to prepare. In 2017, however, just a few hours after the drill, the alarm sounded again. A 7.1-magnitude earthquake had struck near the city of Puebla, 120 kilometres south of Mexico City. With the epicentre so close to the capital, the early-warning system gave residents only seconds to evacuate or otherwise prepare. Despite the measures taken, Kelman says that far too many buildings collapsed – even newer ones – resulting in the deaths of 369 people.
Sometimes mitigation measures don’t work because a region lacks the resources to properly implement, monitor and enforce them. ‘But sometimes,’ says Kelman, ‘they just didn’t do what they were meant to do.’ He cites the UK as tending towards complacency and overconfidence in its ability to manage risks. ‘We see it every winter. Local people are losing everything they owned to flooding; they may be out of their homes for six to 12 months, and those homes are rebuilt in a way that is still vulnerable. I’ve sat in meetings with government officials who say that we’re absolutely ready for floods, and we know that we’re not.’
The UK is far from alone in this regard; Kelman points out how vulnerable cities such as Boston, Washington DC and New York would be if a category-five hurricane were to hit the US east coast. ‘And in focusing on cyclones,’ he adds, ‘Bangladesh has neglected earthquakes. When – not if – a big one hits Dhaka, it could be the world’s first million-death earthquake.’
Disasters Avoided is an ongoing project and Kelman is keen to hear about any smaller, local examples of disasters that have been prevented by mitigation strategies – the kind that might be overlooked by national media and academic literature. ‘We really need feedback from people, especially when it comes to understanding the hurdles that prevent individuals from being better prepared. What’s stopping you from stockpiling two weeks’ worth of food, for example? Is it the cost-of-living crisis? A lack of storage space? This is all information that can help us to understand what we could and should be doing to encourage everyone to be better prepared.’
Wildfires, Colorado
‘If you live in Boulder County, it is not a matter of if wildfire will impact your home and community but when,’ reads the website of Wildfire Partners, an organisation that helps homeowners in Colorado, USA, to protect their properties from fire damage. The organisation offers support in a number of ways, including individual home assessments that certify whether a property has completed all actions required to mitigate against wildfire (such as mowing lawns and clearing dry vegetation, or ensuring that buildings are well maintained). On 8 July 2016, a poorly extinguished campfire ignited a wildfire in the Colorado mountains. The Cold Springs fire burned across more than two square kilometres, destroying eight homes and forcing 2,000 people to evacuate. Eight other houses in the torched forest survived unscathed. Each was certified by Wildlife Partners. Studies show that, when it comes to wildfire-prone regions, the benefits of wildfire-mitigation measures far outweigh the costs (in Colorado, the work is estimated to be less than seven per cent of the property’s value) and can reduce wildfire risk by up to 75 per cent.
Floods, Vietnam
Every year during the rainy season, floods affect nearly 12 million citizens living in coastal Vietnam. For many living in the Mekong Delta, floods have long been a way of life, but climate change is exposing more and more people to regular and more severe flooding. One UN-funded project has built 4,000 resilient houses in flood risk areas of the country, while planting coastal mangroves to reduce the strength of storm surges. In late 2019, when the city of Quang Ngai was struck by a tropical storm that destroyed many homes, the flood-resilient buildings survived.
