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Natural disasters are not necessarily inevitable but are becoming more likely, and engineers must work with governments to help communities become more resilient to extreme weather events, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, the IMechE has said.
Tim Fox, head of energy and climate change at the institution, said increasing levels of urbanisation, especially in poorer countries, combined with a greater number of extreme weather events, were creating the conditions for major disasters to take place.
He told PE: “Mass urbanisation in the developing world is leading to people coalescing around vulnerable sites, and that is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of migrants are moving into informal settlements. In addition, there is an ongoing erosion of the natural barriers that surround cities that enable them to weather the impact of a natural disaster.”
But the notion that extreme weather – extreme weather events increased between 2001 and 2010, according to data – must inevitably cause chaos was misplaced, Fox said. “We want to take a different approach to prevent extreme natural events becoming natural disasters – they only become so if we’re not adequately prepared.”
He said the Indian government had prepared sufficiently to ensure that the impact of Cyclone Phailin on India in the Bay of Bengal last month was relatively limited, for example.
There was no discernible trend in terms of numbers of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, Fox said, but sea levels were rising and there was an increase in extreme weather events due to changing climate. In tandem with this trend, the world’s population was expected to swell to 9 billion by the middle of the century – with 75% of people living in cities. “But the number of natural disasters occurring is not due to increases in extreme weather – it’s due to the fact that communities are not resilient to it.”
For example, more than half of China’s urbanised industrial communities are at risk of flood. Not only could this affect the local population, but adverse weather events could also severely affect the global economy, which is increasingly dependent on the Far East.
Fox encouraged governments to act now to make communities more resilient. Every dollar invested in advance in resilience would save four dollars later on in emergency relief, he claimed. His findings are detailed in the IMechE report Natural Disasters: Saving Lives Today, Building Resilience For Tomorrow.
Without an intervention by engineers and governments, the trend in terms of natural disasters is likely to be upward, Fox said. Increasing resilience included building redundancy into power and water networks, he said. “You need a system to be able to continue to function if part of it goes down.” For example, in New York during Hurricane Sandy, an area in The Bronx was able to operate a 40MW CHP plant to run a micro-grid which kept electricity on in the local area while most New Yorkers were plunged
into darkness.