Life Will Never Be the Same Again
donaldlloyd
in Climate Change, COVID-19, Crisis and Emergency Management, Emergency Management, Events, Indigenous, NGO
Well, 2021 has certainly started off with a bang! Between political turmoil in the U.S., a surging global pandemic and the fallout from a major state-sponsored hack, it is easy to forget that 2020 was a record-breaking year for extreme weather events in North America.
According to the Canadian Disaster Database (CDD), in the most recent 10-year period for which qualifying data have been recorded, there have been a total of 185 flood, severe weather, and wildfire incidents in Canada. (This number is extremely low compared to all recorded Canadian data – e.g., BC alone recorded more than 13,000 wildfires during the same period.) Of the 185 incidents in the CDD, 107 involved a total evacuation of 228,448 Canadians. Qualifying costs for 90 of the 185 incidents captured by the CDD amounted to about $15.8 billion.
From a Council of Canadian Academies report on climate change risks, insured losses from extreme weather events in Canada rose from an average of $405 million per year between 1983 and 2008 to $1.8 billion per year between 2009 and 2017. Since 2010, liabilities accruing to the federal Disaster Assistance Arrangements program have regularly exceeded $1 billion.
The full economic impact of the 2013 flooding in Alberta is projected to exceed $6 billion. In 2016 alone, the Canadian insurance industry paid 200,000 claims worth a record $4.9 billion for property damage due to weather-related events. And, in 2018, businesses filed $1.4 billion in insurance claims due exclusively to the Fort McMurray wildfires.
One estimate of the future costs associated with climate change in Canada puts them in the neighbourhood of $30 billion per year by 2050. For someone who has been around the emergency management and public safety industries as long as I have, this doesn’t seem like a long way off.
Life is never going to be the same again in the aftermath of the current pandemic, and things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. This is concerning given that almost 70 percent of emergency managers and incident commanders believe they do not have access to the information management tools they need to support their incident management processes. The military understands the need for command and control systems to support its missions. At some point, the majority of emergency management and public safety organizations are going to need similar but more flexible and adaptable incident management systems if they plan to be successful in facing the increasing range and scope of threats from climate change as well as a host of other sources such as home-grown terrorism, cyber security incidents and new pandemics. Welcome to the foreseeable future! (https://countercrisis-tech.com)
