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Risk management alone fails to limit the impact of extreme climate events

An analysis of floods or droughts that hit the same place twice shows that using risk management alone does not reduce the effect of extreme events. Addressing the social drivers of hazard impact, equitably, is essential.
  1. Beth Tellman

    1. Beth Tellman is in the School of Geography, Development & Environment, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85719, USA.

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  2. Hallie Eakin

    1. Hallie Eakin is in the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA.

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Floods and droughts seem to be occurring with increasing frequency and severity, pushing the limits of society’s ability to prepare for these extreme events through prediction and effective adaptation. We would like to believe that we learn from each disaster, and are thus better adapted to handle the next one. But is this really the case? In a paper in Nature, Kreibich et al.1 examine 45 places where an extreme flood or drought happened twice, and determine whether risk-management strategies successfully reduced the impact of the second disaster. The authors’ analysis suggests that adaptation is nearly always limited, and that the impact of a second event is not reduced by risk-management strategies when the event is more extreme than the first one.

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Nature 608, 41-43 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02031-0

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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