Forecasting natural hazards - Natural Hazards Consulting

This week, from 18-19 May 2023, the High-Level Meeting of the Midterm Review of the Sendai Framework will be held in New York, organised by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction is an agreement that all of our countries have signed up to in order to substantially reduce global disaster risks and losses.

Overview of Sendai goals (source: UNDRR)

Also this week, a severe tropical cyclone, ‘Mocha’, hit the border region of Myanmar and Bangladesh, an area of particular vulnerability due to massive refugee camps and low-lying land. Early reports of the death toll suggested that the impact had been much less than feared (in part due to the several days warning given by both the Myanmar and Bangladesh meteorological agencies and the mobilised response), but hundreds of thousands have people have still been left homeless.

And also this week, disaster preparedness and response has been a major issue in a Presidential election in Turkey, the Australian Government has announced a major restructure of national flood monitoring and warning arrangements, and a year 11 student died in a caving tragedy in New Zealand that occurred while the area was under a rain warning.

It’s fair to say that disasters, large and small, are never far away from the headlines in any part of the world. Consequently, the discussions in New York this week, and the wider work of disaster risk reduction, matter greatly.

Link to report of midterm review of Sendai

So, where are we at, half-way through Sendai? Earlier this year, the UNDRR released the Report of the Midterm Review of Sendai. And, while it has lots of good news to report, it’s a far from rosy report, as highlighted in the Foreword:

“However, at the midpoint of the implementation of the 2015 agreements, progress has stalled and, in some cases, reversed. This has resulted not only from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also from short- versus long-termism, weakened multilateralism, disconnects between the real and the financial economies, rising inequality, and barriers between risk science, perception and risk-informed decision-making. Risks are being created and accumulating faster than our ability to anticipate, manage and reduce them, and when those risks are realized as shocks or disasters, they bring increasingly dire consequences for people, livelihoods, society and the ecosystems on which we depend.”

The report discusses the mixed progress against the goals of the Framework, the challenges encountered (including the grim lessons from COVID), and then lays out some strategic perspectives and recommendations, sprinkled with more less than cheerful phrases:

“The complexity of global catastrophic risk is overwhelming conventional governance systems, which were designed to address incremental environmental and social changes, rather than non-linear processes and complex interactions between drivers of risk and the irreversible impacts of breaching planetary boundaries.”

“With growing uncertainties and increasingly complex risks, amplified by increasing disaster impacts and losses, belief in our collective ability to achieve the 2030 Agenda appears to be waning.”

At the meeting this week, delegates will consider a draft political declaration coordinated by co-facilitators (from Australia and Indonesia). Fully charged and armed with the groundwork behind the review, the draft doesn’t pull any punches:

“We express deep concern at the increasing frequency and intensity, as well as the number and scale of disasters and their devastating impacts, which have resulted in massive loss of life, food insecurity and famine, biodiversity loss, water-related challenges, increased displacement, humanitarian and development needs and longterm negative economic, social and environmental consequences, especially for those in vulnerable situations throughout the world, and which are undermining progress towards sustainable development, the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the achievement of its Sustainable Development Goals, in particular for the least developed countries, small island developing States, landlocked developing countries and African countries, as well as middle-income countries facing specific challenges.”

The draft declaration renews and updates calls for action on the four Sendai priorities: 1) Understanding disaster risk, 2) Strengthening disaster risk governance, 3) Investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience, and 4) Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response and to “Build Back Better” in recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction. In support of that last priority, the declaration also highlights the UN Early Warnings For All initiative and calls for universal coverage of multi-hazard early warning systems.

Live streams of the meeting sessions on Wednesday 17- Friday 19 May (New York time) are available here. Country reports, regional reports, UN reports, thematic studies, and other contributions are also available as part of the meeting documents.

It’s easy to see UN processes as remote, inaccessible, and ineffective. But the vital work of the world’s disaster risk reduction community affects us all, and includes us all – nothing globally agreed can occur without local hands making it work. The first step to making progress on global disaster risk reduction is to make sure we’re all on board. Accessing Sendai processes is as easy as clicking a link and then considering how to help make it happen.

It’s too early to post-analyse the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption. For one, we don’t know whether the eruption itself is finished. But mainly, the real work is still just beginning to understand and respond to what has happened. Tonga is still assessing the impacts, urgent relief operations are just getting into gear, operational scientists and emergency management professionals are still in the thick of things, and much of the Tongan community is still anxiously waiting for news.

And yet, since the whole world has been talking about something other than the pandemic, it’s probably a really good time to say some things that can be said now. Here are five things that I think will hold true after the wash-up.

1. The quality of remote sensing observations has been astonishing. At least four operational geostationary weather satellites (from Japan, the USA, Korea, and China) observed the eruption from their respective positions 36000 km above the equator, tracking the eruption in real time and with multichannel imagery at resolutions of around 1 km and every 10 minutes. At least one of these satellites (NOAA’s GOES-17) captured part of the peak phase of the eruption at 1-minute intervals, with a likely record cold cloud temperature of -105.18 C. Meanwhile, other instruments on a variety of satellites tracked the stratospheric gas (and ash) clouds, and measured the maximum height of the column (at least 35 km at time of writing, twice as high as a tropical thunderstorm tends to get). The observations are so much better than during the largest and highest (40 km) eruption so far recorded on satellite, Mount Pinatubo in 1991. At that time, the Japanese GMS-4 satellite had imagery at hourly intervals and single-band infrared resolution at 5 km, which was fantastic for its time. Had we had the current quality of imagery back then, we would have seen so much more.

Data like this doesn’t just happen. The work of the remote sensing and international meteorological community to steadily develop satellite instruments and techniques, and to share the data with neighbours has been incredible, passionate, and very, very fruitful. Launching a satellite is a major enterprise, but the pay-off for the world’s community is enormous.

above: OMPS Limb Profile plot showing part of the leading edge of the cloud at 35 km altitude over Australia on 17 January 2022. Ghassan Taha / NASA

2. Lives were saved on the ground through warnings and response. We’ll hear much more about what went right, and what went wrong. This was the kind of event that nobody wants to have to deal with in their lifetime and must have been (and continue to be) very stressful for Tonga’s professional warning and emergency management community. However, we know that both the Tongan Meteorological Service and Tonga Geological Services were actively distributing information and the public were highly attuned to the eruptions in the days leading up to the 15th, with a tsunami warning issued on the 14th and then another warning and a mass evacuation on the 15th. Of course, there will be things that could have been improved, but, like any such extreme event, this is an opportunity for us to pause, admire, and be grateful for the job that the warning and response community do all day and night across the world.

3. Ground and sea observations matter. Operational tide gauges, deep sea buoys, barometers, upper-air soundings and the like all played their part in tracking the tsunami and forecasting the path of the ash and gas cloud. But there is much more that can be done. Many of the regions’ active or potentially active volcanoes are poorly monitored, if at all. Meteorological observational networks are patchy at best through the region, a situation that directly affects the quality of weather forecasting in the rest of the world. Sustainable, long-term solutions are needed in this space, such as the recently launched Systematic Observations Financing Facility, a global multi-agency effort to spread the load of taking weather and climate observations. How will we implement this effort successfully? How will we eventually ensure that all other needed earth system observations, including marine and seismic observations, are sustainably taken and their data shared?

4. Multi-hazard early warning systems shouldn’t be just talk. Through the UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, we, the people of the world, have signed up to a target to ‘substantially increase the availability of and access to multi-hazard early warning systems and disaster risk information and assessments to people by 2030’. That’s pretty soon, and a multi-hazard event like this volcanic eruption shows us how far we have to go. Our tsunami warning systems are focused on earthquakes, not volcanoes, although the volcanic risk has been known since at least when the 1883 eruption of Krakatau killed 36,000 people. Countries around the Pacific Rim worked hard to make their systems work in this event, but there is much work to do. Our volcanic ash system for aircraft, the International Airways Volcano Watch, operated during this event and has come a long way since its inception in the 80s, but there is no global equivalent for the sea and the ground, with countries largely left to their own devices other than through bilateral partnerships. There’s a lot more we could do to support the world’s volcanologists to help achieve a functional global set of multi-hazard early warning systems. Even relatively mature warning systems, such as tropical cyclone (hurricane, typhoon) warning systems, suffer from inconsistent definitions and approaches between countries. To handle every natural hazard event seamlessly, we’ve got a lot of connecting up and data sharing between disciplines, countries and systems to do.

5. Investments into these areas are worthwhile, no matter how you measure them. Everybody knows that it’s good diplomacy to help your neighbours. However, if you do it well (genuinely helping them in long term partnerships rather than dumping a bunch of useless gear), the benefits can flow far beyond your mutual borders. This is particularly true for monitoring, forecasting, and warning for natural hazards. Typically, for example, investments into meteorological services have a return of around ten dollars for each dollar invested. However, strategic investment in areas that need it can yield much more – for example a recent World Bank study conservatively estimated a global benefit to cost ratio of over twenty-five for investing in surface meteorological observations in data-sparse regions such as the Pacific. One under-appreciated fact of meteorology is that, if observations are improved anywhere in the world, the whole world benefits, since everything in the atmosphere is inter-connected. Taking and sharing better observations in the SW Pacific, for example, would directly improve weather forecasts across the region and create at least several hundred millions of dollars per year in annual benefits.

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai dramatically underlined all of this for us. As the atmospheric shock waves continue to ring around the world, as we start to look at how the tsunami travelled across the oceans, and as we start to respond to Tonga’s needs, we have been reminded that, just like in a pandemic, we really are all in this together. And, as we grieve for the victims of this disaster and support the relief effort, there are also plenty of longer term things to do in response.

(first published on LinkedIn on 19 January 2022)