Does Disaster Mitigation Mask a Climate Change Signal in Disaster Losses?
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters Based on the current peer-reviewed literature, it absolutely does not. This post explains why this is the case. One reaction to our work on attribution of factors responsible for the increase in weather-related losses worldwide has been to claim that successful disaster mitigation, that is, the protection of people and property from losses related to extreme events, has masked the role of climate change in driving increasing disaster losses. Such claims are not backed up by data or analysis. For example, in his response to a comment (here in PDF) in Science Evan Mills asks, “What are the offsetting effects of human efforts to curb losses (building codes, early warning systems, fire protection, flood defenses, land-use planning, crop irrigation, etc.)?” He provides an answer to this question in his original paper: “Many human activities mask losses that would otherwise manifest in the trend data. These include improved buildi
