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Thailand Forecast: Floods, Droughts and Political Instability
The devastation caused by Thailand’s recent floods is vast. Two million people across 26 provinces were affected by the event, at least 527 people were killed, and a quarter of the country’s important rice crop may have been decimated. But beyond these headlines, the flood waters present a very harsh lesson in resilience. Climate change, weather, geography and politics all conspired to teach this lesson – but not just to Thailand. It is a warning to a world facing myriad risks in the ecological landscape – risks that are exacerbated by the volatility of political institutions, and the uncertainties that come with them. The challenge, for Thailand and the globe, will be to make the task of managing these risks impervious to the politics of the day, and responsive to the challenges of the future. (more…)
Data Presenters Can Be Heroes Too: Mapping Climate and Disaster Risk
One of the most famous examples of effective statistical data presentation is Charles Joseph Minard’s “Mapping Napoleon’s March.” The chart (below) details the geographical progression of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Russian campaign of 1812, and powerfully communicates to the reader the scale of lives lost over time, space and temperature. The effect is clear. The data, presented in such a way, fully demonstrates how disastrous the campaign was, and how closely that devastation was linked to cold weather. It has taken many an author entire books to get the same point across.
But in addition to telling us about lives lost in centuries past, can data presentation be useful for saving lives in the future? (more…)
Double Whammy: Sudden and Slow-onset Disasters for Pacific Island States
Those involved in international climate policy often hear about the plight of Pacific Island states in the face of climate change (though, some argue, this has not been met with adequate attention by academic researchers). But in order to avoid becoming desensitized to the concerns of this part of the world, it is important to revisit and reprocess some of the serious dangers these nations face. A new synthesis report from the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, which follows a series of workshops last May, continues to shine a light on the problem, identifying the simple fact that these countries face the worst of both kinds of climate-exacerbated natural disasters: sudden-onset and slow-onset. As the report states: (more…)