The disaster map is being changed by climate change

Climate Change in the United States: The Inferno of Maui, Hawaii’s Most Polluted City, and the Impact on the Local Economy

Environmental catastrophe isn’t happening in a vacuum. It piles on top of previous harms. It’s no wonder Maui residents are saying that the inferno there this month is no “natural” disaster. The US colonialism and Big Agriculture boom on the islands changed the landscape and set the stage for fire. Sugarcane and pineapple plantations tore through the lush, native ecology. When fields went fallow, invasive, ignitable grasses took over and introduced new fire risk — risk that’s growing as climate change exacerbates drought.

Climate change can be observed not just in the US, but all over the world. Disaster is piling on community figuring out how to adapt to new realities. They are faced with some new challenges while still recovering from the last one.

greenhouse gas emissions from using fossil fuels are now the primary driver of more extreme weather, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Warming on land and at sea is caused by greenhouse gases. hurricanes feed off heat energy and cause Warmer waters to make bigger storms. It helped propel Hurricane Hilary into a Category 4 storm and kept it strong in Baja California and Southern California.

The hot climate is drying up the landscape. It makes forests and grassland burn. There is enough fire danger for fires to explode into mega blazes. There’s smoke where the fire is. The risk of disease caused by exposure to wildfire smoke is new in the US. New York City briefly held the title of the most polluted city in the world in June when a blanket of smoke traveled some 500 miles from raging fires in Quebec to darken skies over the Big Apple.

The deadliest wildfires in Hawaii’s history leveled Lahaina this month. Lahaina was once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom before it became a tourist destination that made it harder for Native Hawaiian residents to afford to live there. There is a chance that the residents will face another land grab in the wake of the disaster. There are other reasons that families might lose their homes.

Communities that have been marginalized often suffer the most from disasters. “Communities that are feeling the impact disproportionately are the lower-income populations, are the ones who are systematically deprioritized and traditionally underserved,” Kruczkiewicz says. When we see these compounding disasters, that is always the case.

You are hit again before you are able to recover if it rains too much. The effect of that string of events is worse if you live in the framework of a multi-hazard possibility.

Canada’s fires have burned more than doubled in the past fifty years, and it is predicted that climate change will return in 2023

Fire experts have predicted for decades that climate change would push Canada’s fires to burn more widely and frequently. But their predictions are coming sooner than they even thought.

Climate models were used in the World Weather Attribution analysis to make a simulation of a world without climate change. The researchers compared that with the weather patterns that actually occurred during 2023—the heat and drought that gripped Canada from January onward and the hottest-ever May and June on record—to see how thoroughly climate change, caused primarily by fossil fuel burning, has reshaped fire weather. They were able to find that such risky conditions were likely to recur roughly every 25 years.

Sandy Erni, a fire and disaster risk expert with Canada’s Forest Service says that the fires have burned both forest and communities.

There have been fires that have burned an area the size of Florida. That’s more than twice as much as the next-most destructive season, 1989. The country’s burned area has more than doubled in the past fifty years.

Many of the fire zones have been hit hard by Indigenous communities. At one point in July, 75% of those under evacuation orders were Indigenous, says Dorothy Heinrich, a disaster risk expert at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center in the Netherlands, who was involved in the study.

Fire activity in the eastern part of the country is expected to increase more than in the west, which is more prepared for big fires.

“The eastern forests are much more sensitive to moisture changes,” says Mohammad Reza Alizadeh, a climate expert at McGill University. A season of unprecedented heat and drought, like 2023, primes the region’s densely packed forests to burn explosively.

Normally, Canada’s wildfire season would begin winding down soon, as autumn sets in. The fire season could last well beyond its historical bounds if the weather forecasts are anything to go by.