The Weather Channel site posted an article about an international conference on disasters: Cost of Natural Disasters Has Quadrupled in Recent Decades, Official Says
It’s getting a lot more expensive to recover from natural disasters today than ever, according to a senior European official who urged world leaders Thursday to spend more on preparing cities and coastal regions for the impact of storms and other disasters to ensure a stable future.
Kristalina Georgieva, European Commissioner for humanitarian aid and crisis response, told a conference on disaster risk reduction and management of the Asia-Europe Meeting that costs related to natural disasters have increased from $50 billion a year in the 1980s to $200 billion in the last decade, an era when the U.S. has weathered the impact of storms like 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. In three of the last four years, disaster-related costs exceeded $200 billion. * * *
She said only 4 percent of spending for natural disasters today goes to prevention and preparedness, with 96 percent spent on response. But, she said, evidence shows every dollar spent on prevention brings at least $4 in savings on damage.
Here is the direct link to the Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM) Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction and Management.
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The Diva also was at a conference this past week, one on Higher Education in Emergency Management, sponsored by FEMA at its training institute. While there she and a long-time friend and colleague, Dr. Dan Barbee, also lamented the fact that after decades of effort, we in the U.S. remain very heavily focused on the response phase of disasters.
Recovery Diva 
Part of the problem is that we pay too little attention to the fact that communities are not monolithic. Unless there is an ROI for protecting infrastructure, it’s cheaper and easier for an electric utility to just continue to restring above-ground power lines, for example. And what about the continuing tension between the certainty of today’s needs vs the uncertainty of tomorrow’s disaster? There are distinct constituencies for today’s needs; nobody really thinks about tomorrow’s disaster. Not to mention that response is a heroic endeavor; recovery requires the patience of saints – and there are many heroes, but too few saints.
The answer, I think, is to rethink recovery. See it as community [re]building, and an ongoing commitment to strengthening the community.
I agree with you re recovery.
Diva,
That’s because response is subjectively easier. It’s easier to determine how many lives you’ve saved, sheltered and fed, and the value of property protected. The known outcome from response is measured in lives saved and property protected. Plus there is a bias to going “all in” for large scale responses; while resources might be overwhelmed it is not for lack of money rather than a result of inadequate levels of preparedness and capabilities for the particular event.
Recovery? What does that mean? And to whom? Does it mean you return to your same job, in your same home, with your neighborhood and social networks intact? That’s a very high bar. Is it instead a similar job in a similar town? I could go on. On a higher level, is it the return to the value of the previous tax base, or instead the previous population? There are so many ways to measure and each one means prioritizing the needs of one interest group over another.
Ultimately recovery, while clearly chock full of best practices, is a political contest to prioritize finite resources. Sure, you can have a Greensburg Kansas with a tiny, homogeneous population, but try exporting that perceived success to the scale and complexity of New Orleans, or Los Angeles or Memphis…. or New York. Response gets the the USCG rescuing people from rooftops, recovery gets kick off meetings and town halls. Recovery is harder. JMO.
Many good points there. Thanks.
And there is no mention of the recovery phase in the article. There is not really a tradeoff to be made between funds allocated to response and those for recovery.
“Fixated” seems like a loaded term. We still don’t do response well enough. So setting up a false competition among the necessary elements of emergency management cannot be productive. We don’t need less focus on response. What we need is much more – additional, not instead of – on recovery and mitigation. And of course we need to prepare to do all three.
Anything that sounds anti-response has to be destructively contentious. We all need to be supportive of one another, not falsely assume zero-sum.
You are right, Ken. I will tone that down. But you have to admit the percentage of expenditure on response, as cited by the international official, is a concern.
Claire
Rather than think of percentage, which puts functions in competition, I would discuss in absolute amounts. Reducing the response amount by half, for example, would raise the prevention percentage, but not represent a step forward.