According to experts, climate change, a diffuse term referring to the long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, is raising ocean and atmospheric temperatures and causing higher sea levels. In turn, these shifts are increasing the frequency, duration, and intensity of natural disasters.
With disaster risk levels rising steeply, organizations and agencies are asking, how can they adapt to climate change? And so, in this article, we examine the role of advanced incident management software in adapting to climate change.
The impact of climate change on natural disasters
By now, it’s fair to say climate change has become a major risk driver, as experts point to a major uptick in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters.
In 2023, for instance, 28 billion-dollar disasters struck the U.S.
The number might not seem large at first glance. But it represents a new record, easily outpacing the previous record of 22, set only three years earlier in 2020.
Zooming out further, and the trendline is pointing in the wrong direction. The yearly average of billion-dollar disasters from the year 1980 to 2022 was only eight. That average has shot up into the 20s over the last five years.
Climate disasters are a global phenomenon
Nor is the U.S. alone. In Australia, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) calculates that more than 200 disaster events have taken place since 2019. More than 1,600 disaster declarations have been issued across 434 local government areas (LGAs) in that period, too.
In fact, in 2022, half of Australia’s LGAs were subject to a disaster declaration, according to the 2024 Report on Disaster Resilience. A staggering 70% of Australians lived in an LGA impacted by a disaster event.
Add to those numbers, 18 million Australians in 2022 lived in an LGA impacted by at least one natural disaster. In some cases, LGAs were impacted by multiple events over the past three years.
Meanwhile, the average number of people living in an impacted area doubled over the past decade, according to the consultancy KPMG.
The climate forecast is getting worse
Worse still, the forecast is getting worse. According to the State of the Climate 2022 report, Australia is projected to experience:
- Continued increases in air temperatures, more heat extremes, and fewer cold extremes
- Continued decreases, on average, in cool season rainfall across many regions of southern and eastern Australia, which will likely lead to more time in drought, but with ongoing climate variability that will give rise to short-duration heavy rainfall events at a range of timescales
- Continued increases in the number of dangerous fire weather days and a longer fire season for southern and eastern Australia
- Further sea level rise and continued warming and acidification of the oceans around Australia
- Increased and longer-lasting marine heatwaves that will affect marine environments, such as kelp forests, and increase the likelihood of more frequent and severe bleaching events in coral reefs around Australia
- Fewer tropical cyclones, but a greater proportion is projected to be of high intensity, with large variations from year to year
Disaster resilience to prepare for and respond to climate disasters
The picture the data paints points up the need for disaster resilience.
But what is disaster resilience, exactly? The United Nations (UN) Office for Disaster Risk Reduction defines disaster resilience thusly:
The ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management.
How to translate these findings into practical steps for organizations and agencies?
Ensuring disaster resilience is a function of adequately managing disaster risk, which NEMA defines as “potential loss of life, injury, or destroyed or damaged assets that could occur to a system, society or a community.”
Steps for reducing disaster risk include:
- Understanding disaster risk
- Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk
- Investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience
- Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response
How advanced incident management software can help organizations adapt to climate change
At a more pragmatic level, enterprises and government agencies should also undertake wide-reaching planning efforts that link with pre-existing security and emergency management arrangements.
We believe those efforts should also include procuring the right incident management tools to enhance disaster resilience and communication particularly in climate disaster-prone areas.
What capabilities to look for? We recommend the following incident management software features:
Incident management
An integrated platform to enable you to report and manage all incidents and crises. Automate notifications, activate teams, assign response tasks, record decisions and developments, and share updates with key stakeholders.
Situational awareness
Improve situational awareness with customizable dashboards that gather data using scrolling banners, live maps, and feeds to consolidate information from various sources, including news, weather, social media, traffic, and natural disaster streams.
Team activation and collaboration
Swiftly notify response teams and keep communication lines open. Team members can easily join dedicated chat groups to discuss incidents while the platform fosters collaboration, allowing them to share important details, assess the impact of the event, and collectively devise effective response strategies.
Crisis communications
With built-in crisis communication and collaboration tools like chat, email, SMS, voice, and app push messages, incident management software can make it easy to work in real-time with your team, better coordinate your response, and keep everyone informed.
Post-incident reviews
Conduct meaningful after-action reviews, improvement activities and post-incident reviews to capture the key takeaways from any incident or exercise. Learn from experience and boost your organization's resilience.
Exercise management
Don't wait for a real-world crisis to test your organization's readiness. With an exercise management solution, you can be confident that teams are prepared to handle any situation that comes their way.
Response plans and checklists
Generate crisis and incident response action plans using our comprehensive library of best practices. Customize pre-existing strategies to align with your organization's requirements or develop your own unique plans to effectively address your organization's specific needs.
Finally, organizations and agencies, wherever they are, are feeling the outsized effects of climate change on their disaster resilience efforts. To bolster those efforts and mitigate disaster risk, they will need to invest in new capacities to plan, coordinate, and streamline incident response.
As we’ve discussed in this article, one place to turn is advanced incident management software. Boasting integrated threat intelligence, response plan activation, team collaboration, and post crisis reviews, incident management solutions such as Noggin’s will help organizations and agencies minimize the negative consequences of an incident, crisis, or emergency and return operations to normal as quickly as possible.
But don’t just take our word for it. Check Noggin out for yourself by requesting a software demonstration.
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