Climate Change Is a Component of Disasters — but That’s Not the Whole Story

On September 6th, 2020, Los Angeles recorded an all-time high temperature of 121 degrees. Seven people died outdoors in public spaces, and emergency visits went up 10 times the normal rate, according to an investigation from the Los Angeles Times. The following days offered little relief, with the heatwave cloaking the county through Labor Day weekend.

While the temperatures were unusual — yet another "unprecedented event" in a year that exhausted the term — this weather was part of an observed trend. Frequent periods of intense heat are becoming more common in Southern California, research shows, and they’re lasting longer, too. This poses a significant threat to residents in this region, as extreme heat has killed more people in the United States than any other category of weather-related event over the past three decades.

A year after the L.A. heat wave, and following several more incidents of record-breaking temperatures across the country, President Biden issued a statement likening these events to superstorms, wildfires and floods. He referred to them all as "climate disasters" — proof, he said, that "we cannot wait to act" on climate change.

There’s broad scientific consensus behind Biden’s call for urgent action to address climate change. But the phrase "climate disaster" is divisive. A number of news outlets and government agencies have adopted it, and some experts say they appreciate the acknowledgement of how climate change intensifies extreme weather events. However, others fear the catchy terminology obscures the additional factors that make a weather event like a heatwave become a public health crisis.

"I feel there is a risk of undermining the human agency — all the things that we could do to reduce exposure or vulnerability to be better prepared," says Katiuscia Fara, a regional advisor with the World Food Program.

There are two dimensions to a disaster: a physical hazard, like heat, and the societal or environmental vulnerability it encounters, explains Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the voice behind the Weather West blog. For this reason, emergency management professionals have long criticized the use of the phrase "natural disasters." There’s even an international "No Natural Disasters" campaign, which rejects the idea that natural hazards are the sole cause of disasters and seeks to reframe the conversation around the social and political causes.

"I think the problem is that humans aren't adapting nearly as quickly as the climate is changing," Swain says. "That mismatch, I think, is where we're going to see ‘climate disasters.’"

While the particulars of language might seem small in the face of problems like increasingly destructive wildfires or hurricanes, Ryan Hagen, a sociologist and lecturer at Columbia University, believes that the language used to describe disasters can help people understand the roles institutions and systems play in creating them.

People think about disasters as events that collide with regular society, he says, when they actually emerge from the ways we organize our day-to-day lives – how neighborhoods are designed, which policies are championed, and the infrastructure we’ve come to rely on that provides us with electricity and water, among other utilities.

"It’s a little like if we started calling plane crashes 'gravity disasters,'" Hagen offers. "Sure, gravity is at work here, but it’s sort of a red herring."

For example, the 2020 Labor Day heatwave intersected with multiple systemic inequities in Los Angeles. The city has a well-documented heat gap, disparate temperatures that align not only with its geography — areas near the water being naturally cooler — but also with its built design. In general, wealthier neighborhoods in the United States, which tend to have more access to green space and tree cover, are cooler than lower-income areas. Studies also show that neighborhoods that were once drawn along racial lines are often hotter.

The 2020 heat wave also overlapped with the ongoing disaster of COVID-19, which similarly has had a disproportionate impact on lower-income households. Kelly Sanders, an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California, studied how Los Angeles and other major U.S. cities that experienced extreme heat during the pandemic responded. She found that the two overlapping disasters resulted in additional vulnerability. Policy changes made to mitigate the spread of the virus, which included limiting the number of cooling centers and other air conditioned spaces available to the public at no cost, created a particular challenge for low-income residents who were more likely to not have air conditioning at home.

"We need to think about the public health responses that can keep communities safe, and then I also think we need to think about the coupling of these extreme events that we're starting to see," Sanders says.

Kian Goh, an urban planning scholar with UCLA and the author of Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice, notes that many disasters are "completely intertwined" with how cities are planned and governed, down to where neighborhoods were built in the first place.

Take California’s wildland-urban interface areas, which were built on the borders of naturally wildfire-prone forests. These areas are now increasingly at risk as climate change drives more intense fire seasons, but that’s just one part of the equation. Additional contributing factors include the buildup of fuels in the forests (a byproduct of a century of misguided fire suppression), nearby industrial timber practices, unsafe building codes, and the threat of aging infrastructure like power lines.

For Swain, recognizing our role in creating risk presents a bright side – if we created these challenges, we can also fix them, though he recognizes it will require significant effort.

"Obviously, to solve the underlying problem [of climate change], we've got to get global carbon emissions close to zero," Swain says. "But at local and regional scales, there is a lot that can be done for almost any kind of hazard. If we collectively decide that it's important to reduce our societal vulnerabilities to these things in specific places, it can be done."