Introduction

Summary

The world is growing more hazardous. Natural disasters are increasing in frequency and severity, spurred in part by changes associated with a warming planet. In their 2020 joint report, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters found that the number of natural disasters rose precipitously since the 1980s, with each year bringing new human and economic losses.¹ Disasters affected 94.9 million people in 2019 alone, and 2020 brought a steady stream of record-breaking calamities, including super typhoons in Southeast Asia, historic wildfires in Australia and across the American West, locust swarms in East Africa and the Middle East, and a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season. COVID-19 emerged as a global public-health emergency, which compounded the impacts of these and many other disasters.² The deadly consequences of the pandemic continue as of this writing. The burdens of catastrophes were and are endured unevenly around the world, often mirroring its inequalities, yet no region completely escaped their impacts. In the United States, the risk of hurricanes, wildfires, river floods, and droughts have intensified in recent decades, and the most recent US Climate Assessment warns of greater hazards in the future.³ A dawning sense of urgency in the face of dramatic and accelerating socioeconomic and environmental change has produced a global clarion call for improved understanding of the roots, consequences, and response to disasters.