Hurricanes

We’re Going to Need a Much Bigger FEMA

FEMA is built to handle one disaster at a time. That’s not going to work in the future.

“When troubles come, they comes not as single spies but as battalions.” That wisdom goes back to Shakespeare. Yet our disaster response system is keyed to handling single disasters, not clusters of major disasters.  That needs to change. This week is a good illustration.  We have fires in California that may set records.  We have …

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Guest Blogger Cliff Villa: Es FEMA El Problema? Hurricane Maria and the Slow Road to Recovery in Puerto Rico

Strolling west on Calle Loiza from the Ocean Park neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico, you could miss the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria last September.  Here in early May 2018, runners and walkers lap the track at Parque Barbosa while middle-aged men try to keep pace with younger guys on the sheltered basketball court.  …

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Disastrous Inequality

Puerto Rico was hit much harder than Houston. But help was much slower coming.

Texas and Puerto Rico both got hit very hard last year by major hurricanes. But the federal government moved a lot more quickly to get help to Texas. In a new paper, I document the difference and explore the reasons. Although I won’t go into all the details here, this is a situation people need …

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The Hurricane Outlook

The journalists are sure about the 2018 hurricane season. The scientists? Not so much.

I’m actually in Puerto Rico today for a conference on the situation here after Hurricane Maria. Since hurricanes are on my mind, I wondered what the forecast for this year looks like. As it turns out, the headlines give significantly different takes on what to expect. Here is a sample of news stories, all issued …

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Katrinas Yet to Come

Climate change is expected to increase hurricane damage by $40 billion per year by the end of the century.

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Extreme Events

I spent yesterday at a conference at RFF on managing “tail risks” — the low-probability but extreme events that are on the tail of the probability distribution.  Some probability distributions have what are called fat tails, meaning that the extreme events are more likely than you would expect from a normal distribution. One way of …

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New and Noteworthy in the Eco-Blogosphere

For the environmental world at large, here are some noteworthy posts: Africa needs substantially scaled-up finance, technology and capacity-building to combat climate change 2009 Hurricane Names to Watch for, as Season Begins After a record-breaking 2008 hurricane season, the first storm has formed before the official June 1 start to the 2009 season. The hydrogen …

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