Many communities are finding themselves overwhelmed, as multiple natural disasters hit them in quick succession, as these compound events crush the existing infrastructure and deplete planned reserves. One only needs to look at the effects of Hurricane Ida to see how severe the impact can be, where floods, winds, and the heat and humidity that followed the storm, leaving people without shelter or power in an environment where air conditioning was a near necessity.
“This is a type of event, definitely we can expect to happen more often. Even if the number of hurricanes don’t change in the future, the likelihood that they are followed by extreme heat is much higher because global temperature is rising,” says Jakob Zscheischler, an Earth system scientist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, to The Verge. These events are becoming part of the common lexicon for researchers. “They are called extreme events because they’re a big deviation from the norm, but they are becoming the norm. We have to deal with the fallout of a new event before we’re finished dealing with the fallout of the previous event,” says Michael Oppenheimer, director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and Environment at Princeton University.
In dealing with these increasingly common compound events, says Radley Horton, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, “You need to have rainy day funds, whether it’s literally, financially speaking, or whether it’s investing in more resilient infrastructure, more emergency service people, and not waiting until a crisis happens.”
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