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- Tropical cyclones, and the torrential rains and strong winds these storms bring along with them, threaten coastal communities around the world and are expected to increase in intensity due to climate change.
- But not every tropical cyclone becomes a natural disaster and not every natural disaster results in human fatalities.
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- Whether or not a natural hazard, such as a tropical cyclone, becomes a natural disaster depends on whether the hazard overwhelms existing human infrastructure in a particular country or region.
- New research presented at the 2018 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C. suggests that at the country level, how effective the national government is, along with how much exposure to the natural hazard a particular region or community faced, are both important factors.
- Researchers often use a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and poverty rates as indicators of tropical cyclone vulnerability and mortality.While these factors are often good proxies for determining vulnerability, they make it difficult to parse out what is actually causing vulnerability and often don’t account for how much exposure to the natural disaster a particular community or region experienced”
- In the new study, Tennant created a global dataset of over a thousand storm events from 1978-2005, bridging socioeconomic data, like national government effectiveness, economic development and human capital with meteorological data, like the wind speed and rainfall associated with a particular storm event.
- Tennant then compared how government effectiveness, measured by the World Governance Index – an annual measure of governance around the world done put out by the World Bank – impacts tropical cyclone fatalities. She found countries with more effective governments experience lower mortality rates than those with ineffective governments.
- But it’s not just government effectiveness that matters when considering mortality rates. Tennant also found storm fatalities are higher when areas that are already vulnerable face higher exposure to a natural hazard.
- This finding may seem like common sense, but most research into mortality occurs at the national scale, erasing how some areas of a country may be more vulnerable than others,
- Understanding which areas are exposed to natural hazards due to tropical cyclones could be helpful for formulating new policies to minimize the vulnerability that some areas face, and Tennant hopes that her work could help to further these efforts.
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