Simultaneous climate events risk damaging entire socioeconomic systems

I have long maintained that there are six existential problems that the human race faces. I call them the Six Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse. These are climate change, inequality, unregulated AI, unregulated human genetic engineering, pandemic, and nuclear war. All of them are linked to unfettered human greed. Of the six, the most immediately potentially catastrophic is climate change.

The cascading effects of extreme weather – such as recent heatwaves which combine heat and drought – and the interconnectedness of critical services and sectors has the potential to destabilize entire socioeconomic systems, according to a study published in PLOS Climate.

Over the past several decades, the frequency and magnitude of concurrent climate extremes, such as heat and drought events, have increased. These events can affect many different assets, sectors, and systems of the human environment, including our security, health, and well-being, although many risk assessments and resilience plans only consider individual events.

To better understand how extreme weather might affect interlinked socioeconomic systems, the authors of the present study conducted a qualitative network-type analysis, first reviewing studies of eight historical concurrent heat and drought extreme events in Europe, Africa, and Australia. Next, they compiled examples of interlinked impacts on several critical services and sectors, including human health, transport, agriculture, food production, and energy. For example, drought events reduced river navigation options, limiting the transport of critical goods. Rail transport was simultaneously stymied when prolonged heat buckled the tracks. Using these analyses, researchers created visualizations of the interconnected effects of concurrent heat and drought events on those services and sectors.

The researchers found the most important cascading processes and interlinkages centered around the health, energy and agriculture, and food production sectors. In some instances, response measures for one sector had negative effects on other sectors.

What the researchers say: “We identified an interconnected web of sectors that interact and cause additional losses and damages in several other sectors,” the lead author said. “This multilevel interconnectedness makes the risks of compound extreme events so complex and critical. More efforts should be concentrated on the analysis of such cascading risks and on strategies to interrupt such chains of impacts, rather than compartmentalizing risk assessment into single extreme events, impacts, and sectors”.

She added, “This study presents unprecedented quantitative information and qualitative understanding of the impacts of combined heat and drought events in major world regions over the past 20 years. It contributes new insights into how these impacts cascade through critical systems (health, energy, food production, etc.) and emphasizes the importance of appropriately considering such impact cascades in adaptation efforts.”

So, what? I have not yet worked with any organization or government which has a plan for coping with interconnected climate events. They take comfort in proclaiming that, for example, the recent floods in Eastern Australia, or the bushfires a few years ago were “1000-year events.”

But they coincided not just with other climate events but with other horsemen as well—the floods with Covid and a government dedicated to promoting inequality and individual self-help and thus unable to provide adequate assistance to those in need.