“I’ll Huff, and I’ll Puff, and I’ll Blow Your House In!”: The Big Bad Wolf of Climate Change is on our Doorstep

By Tim Beres, Vice President and Director, Safety and Security

There is a Big Bad Wolf, and he is not a character in a fairy tale. The Big Bad Wolf that the emergency management community is now facing is global climate change. Over the past few years, we have seen him huff and puff and blow our houses in. The question is, what are we going to do to protect ourselves?

Like the three little pigs in the story, we need to recognize that the old way and the easy way of doing things will not stand up in the face of extreme weather events. In our current environment, storms are more frequent, stronger, and cover a larger geographic area than in the past. As we saw with Hurricane Sandy and other recent storms, mutual aid arrangements were stressed beyond their current planning assumptions, command and control issues arose, the restoration of lifelines such as power did not meet community expectations, and areas that had not been seen as vulnerable in the past are now viewed as very much at risk.

To better protect our communities from the ravages that come with global climate change and to make them more resilient, emergency managers must transform their approach and possess an unshakeable will to develop and implement the mitigation, response, and recovery strategies needed to adapt. CNA has been engaged in such work for several years and has looked at many aspects of the issue, including the intersections between extreme weather and national security, migration, and emergency management. Our 2010 report on this subject—Why the Emergency Management Community Should be Concerned about Climate Change—describes several implications of weather-related hazards and explores various aspects of emergency management, from preparedness to recovery.

The report also addresses the need for emergency managers to rethink previously held assumptions:

1. Emergency managers need to engage with regional climate research groups to ensure that they are getting the proper data to inform regional Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessments (THIRAs). This data will help inform important decisions on land use-planning; building codes and zoning; and insurance/tax incentives and investments that could be significant in infrastructure improvements, such as improving and hardening sewer systems.
2. Emergency managers need to lead efforts to set communities’ expectations for assistance. For example, increases in the frequency, size, and severity of hazards have increasingly strained local resources, necessitating a revision to the now outdated 72-hour rule of self-sufficiency.
3. Emergency managers need to be at the forefront of identifying and defining the criteria required for rebuilding post-disaster. Some of these decisions will be about building codes for stronger, more resilient construction. However, emergency managers also need to be ready to provide leadership in discussions when rebuilding may not make sense economically, in light of sustained and long-term shifts in hazard patterns.

This reorientation to a new environmental reality could pose a real challenge for all of our communities. Preparedness efforts will require a significant amount of time, energy, thought, planning, engineering, money, and tough decision-making to get us where we need to be. Adding to the challenge, many will be skeptical of the need to invest in these changes and could view these initiatives as too daunting. In response, emergency managers—who have the knowledge, skills, and opportunity to engage with political leaders and their communities—can help to address these issues and implement change. It has been said that “a skeptic is a person who, when he sees the handwriting on the wall, claims it is a forgery,” so emergency managers can play an important role in the efforts to convince the skeptic that the Big Bad Wolf is real and that he needs to be dealt with.