President-elect Joe Biden
COVID is just the beginning. Hurricanes and wildfires and other climate-related crises are going to take more of the next president’s time than he can imagine.
By Irwin Redlener, Jeff Schlegelmilch, and Sean Hansen
The incoming Biden-Harris administration will have a long list of disaster-related issues to contend with—and we don’t just mean the urgent necessity to combat the still-raging COVID-19 pandemic.
When Hurricane Iota made landfall in northeastern Nicaragua as a Category 4 storm last month, it became the 30th named storm this year alone—setting a record high for a year also marked by some of the worst wildfires ever seen, as well as a plethora of climate change-related storms, severe droughts, and a variety of catastrophic events across the planet. By September, the U.S. alone had already counted 16 separate billion-dollar climate-related storms.
It’s worth recalling, too, that until the pandemic took hold, the prevailing sense may have been that disasters were indeed more frequent and more severe—but invariably local. It was the Gulf or the U.S. West Coast that took the hit. That was then.
The COVID-19 pandemic, in stark contrast, is, by definition ubiquitous, rising and falling in waves. It’s up in one region, down in another, and surges again in a place it had previously laid low—behaving much like a lethal game of geographic whack-a-mole.
So when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are finally sworn on Jan. 20, they’ll face the most complex set of disaster challenges in modern history. The pandemic will be front and center, of course, but also demanding attention will be the need to mitigate climate change—the underlying driver responsible for the growing severity and frequency of natural disasters. At the same time there is a need to develop and institutionalize protocols for handling overlapping catastrophic events.
Given these realities, here’s how three key issues that will likely play out within President Biden’s broader “disaster agenda”…
