disaster – Eastern European Association of the Greens

Usually, Jay Lacia wakes at midnight on Christmas Day to start the festivities – but this year, all he wished for was enough food to eat. “We always celebrated Christmas, but for now, it’s too hard,” the 27-year-old father of one said, as he sat among rubble in the typhoon-hit city of Surigao, at the northeastern tip of Mindanao in the Philippines, CNN reports.

Broken wood, scraps of metal, and plastic waste line the shore, where an exhausted stray dog sleeps. The stench of waste and dead fish engulf the air.

More than a week after Super Typhoon Rai – known locally as Odette – slammed into the Philippines, Lacia has given up trying to salvage whatever is left of his home. Not a single house stands anymore in his village on nearby Dinagat Island.

“Everything was gone, including my house,” Lacia said. “The roof, and any wood that we built with, was gone.”

Jay Lacia sits among crumbled homes, fallen trees and broken power cables. He lost everything when Super Typhoon Rai hit the Philippines on December 16.

Nobody expected the wrath Rai would unleash when it struck the archipelago on December 16. It was the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year, killing nearly 400 people, while displacing hundreds of thousands more.

The Philippines experiences several typhoons a year, but the climate crisis has caused storms to become more unpredictable and extreme – while leaving the nation’s poorest most vulnerable.

Families like Lacia’s lost everything. And now, they face the nearly impossible task of rebuilding their homes without enough food to eat or water to drink.

“We thought we were safe because we tied up our house. We thought that was enough to keep it from collapsing,” he said. “We put a weight on our roof to keep it from being blown away. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough.”

Homeless at Christmas

Nearly 4 million people across more than 400 cities were affected by Typhoon Rai, according to the Philippine National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC).

More than half a million remained displaced during Christmas – one of the most important holidays in the Catholic-majority nation.

“Families have nothing,” Jerome Balinton, humanitarian manager for Save the Children said. “Bright lights and Christmas music is replaced with dirty, humid evacuation centers. Their only wish this Christmas is to survive.”

Jovelyn Paloma Sayson, 35, from Surigao City evacuated to her community’s parish church before Rai struck. Her fragile hut made from wood, plastic and metal, did not withstand the storm’s powerful gusts of wind.

“The roofs of every house were flying everywhere,” the mother of seven said as she sat amid the ruins of her home. “Our house was the first one to collapse. First, the roof flew off. Then the foundation crumbled. After my house was destroyed, my mother’s house collapsed.”

All of the family’s food was destroyed by floods. Their stock of rice — a staple for the Southeast Asian country — was floating in muddy water next to broken pieces of wood. Sayson’s children’s clothes are ruined from the rain, and her furniture reduced to fragments.

Sayson’s kitchen appliances were stolen in the aftermath. She cannot afford to rebuild from scratch, she said.

“We need money to rebuild our house,” she said. “We are not dreaming of having a mansion. All we want is to have our own house to live in so that our children are safe.”

Despite the trauma, her family still gathered to celebrate the holiday.

“We had nothing to eat,” Sayson said. “Someone gave us sliced bread and canned goods. Even though we are poor, we have a party every Christmas.”

Residents salvage what's left of their damaged homes following Typhoon Rai in Cebu, central Philippines on December 17, 2021. — Residents salvage what’s left of their damaged homes following Typhoon Rai in Cebu, central Philippines on December 17, 2021.

Prolonged displacement and suffering

More than 1,000 temporary shelters have been set up to house those whose homes have crumbled, according to the NDRRMC.

For many of the displaced families, the trauma and suffering are unbearable.

Alvin Dumduma, Philippines project manager for aid group Humanity and Inclusion, said it’s “exhausting” for families to try and rebuild their homes “while starving and thirsty.”

Cramped inside unsanitary evacuation centers with no running water, he is concerned about the potential spread of diseases, including Covid-19.

“The conditions in the evacuation centers are far from ideal. It’s unhygienic. Thousands are sleeping under one roof with no clean water,” he added. “Children aren’t going to school. There is no electricity either. They will be stuck like this for a long time.”

Dumduma said the disaster has also devastated these families’ livelihoods.

Toppled electrical posts line a street in Cebu, central Philippines, after Typhoon Rai on December 17, 2021.

“Many are from fishing or farming communities whose boats and land have been destroyed,” he said. “They will struggle a lot to build back their business.”

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said the government will raise money for the rehabilitation and recovery of typhoon-ravaged areas. The United Nations has also promised more than $100 million in aid.

But Dumduma said much more needs to change at the government level to avoid such devastation from future storms.

“Chaos unfolded because the government was not prepared. They must strengthen their disaster and response program,” he said. “We need more training, more preparation and early action.”

CNN has reached out to the NDRRMC for comment but did not hear back before publication.

Motorists speed past fallen coconut trees at the height of Super Typhoon Rai along a highway in Del Carmen town, Siargao island on December 20, 2021.

Effects of the climate crisis

Located along the typhoon belt in the western Pacific Ocean, the Philippines regularly experiences big storms — but the climate crisis has caused these events to become more extreme and unpredictable.

As the climate crisis worsens, cyclones are becoming more intense and destructive. Rai evolved rapidly from the equivalent of a Category 1 to a Category 5 storm in just 24 hours, packing winds of up to 260 kilometers (160 miles) per hour.

And the country was not prepared for a disaster of this scale.

Kairos Dela Cruz, deputy head of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, said developing countries are reaching their limit of being able to handle natural disasters on their own and those that live in low-lying, coastal areas will soon lose their homes to rising sea levels.

A study published in November by researchers at the Shenzhen Institute of Meteorological Innovation and the Chinese University of Hong Kong found typhoons in Asia could have double their destructive power by the end of the century. They already last between two and nine hours longer and travel an average of 100 kilometers (62 miles) further inland than they did four decades ago.

Rescuers help residents over floodwaters caused by Typhoon Rai as they are evacuated to higher ground in Cagayan de Oro City, southern Philippines on December 16, 2021.

The climate crisis also exposes systemic problems in the Philippines, Dela Cruz said.

“We need more resources to help us and (we should) play a stronger role internationally to push for more climate finance,” he said.

According to Dela Cruz, a storm of Rai’s scale in December is unusual for the Philippines, which usually experiences typhoons from June to September.

For Alita Sapid, 64, the effects of the climate crisis are clearly visible.

“We have had typhoons before, but this was extremely strong,” she said of Rai. Sapid stayed at home in Surigao with her husband, daughter, and four grandchildren when the typhoon hit, but as the water seeped in, they decided it was time to evacuate.

Alita Sapid's roof blew off her family's home during Typhoon Rai. — Alita Sapid’s roof blew off her family’s home during Typhoon Rai.

“I told my husband to get out of here because we might die here,” she said. “My grandchildren had to crawl on the roads because the wind was so strong.”

The roof of Sapid’s home is completely destroyed. With nowhere to go and no money for now, the family has no choice but to sleep in their exposed home – whatever is left of it.

“Aside from thinking about what we were going to prioritize in the repair, we are also thinking about how we can get our food,” she said.

“We have not received any help yet. We are just waiting for someone to help us.”

A long road to recovery

Lacia, from Dinagat Island, will relocate with his wife and child to Surigao. It is safer there, he said.

“My neighbors are no longer (in Dinagat). Most of them have left because there is nothing left in our neighborhood,” he said.

All he has left to his name are some matchsticks, a box of rice, dried fish, and canned goods.

“In my family, we really need help so we can rise again and return to our livelihood,” Lacia said.

“Odette really was a Super Typhoon,” he said. “We lost our home, damaged by the force of the wind brought by the storm. We did everything, but it still was not enough.”

The series of weekend tornadoes that ripped through the parts of the US this weekend adds to another stretch of deadly and potentially unprecedented weather disasters that plagued the planet this year. Meteorologists and climate scientists say the latest outbreak is historic, CNN reports.

And as these extreme weather events intensify, occur more often and exacerbate the country’s growing economic toll, science is running to keep up to answer emerging questions of whether climate change is intensifying every single disaster. With this weekend’s tornadoes, climate researchers say it’s too early to determine the link, but the uncertainty doesn’t mean it is unlikely.

In Kentucky, the series of tornadoes uprooted trees, tore down homes and infrastructure, and killed at least 74 people. Gov. Andy Beshear said at a news conference that the tornado event reached a “level of devastation unlike anything I have ever seen,” he said.

Global scientists made clear that weather events, no matter how severe, are occurring against the backdrop of human-caused climate change; nevertheless, it all comes down to discerning how a warming planet is altering weather patterns, including geographical location and frequency, as well as severity.

Scientists say the short-lived scale of tornadoes, coupled with an extremely inconsistent and unreliable historical record, makes connecting outbreaks to long-term, human-caused climate change extremely challenging.

Unlike large-scale and slow-trending weather events such as droughts, floods and hurricanes, scientific research about the link between climate change and tornadoes has not been as robust.

Victor Gensini, a professor at Northern Illinois University and one of the top tornado experts, said the weekend’s outbreak is one of the most remarkable tornado events in US history — and while climate change may have played a part in its violent behavior, it’s not yet clear what that role was.

Think of a pair of dice, he said. On one of the die, you altered the value of five to six, which means it now has two sixes — raising the chances of you rolling the pair of dice and getting the value 12. Although you can’t immediately attribute that value of 12 to the change you made, you just altered the probability of that event occurring.

Gensini said that’s similar to how the climate system now works — the more humans pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and change the system, the chances of extreme weather events occurring will amplify.

He points to different ingredients that primed the landscape for the outbreak to happen, such as late spring, early summer air mass and strong wind shear.

“When you start putting a lot of these events together, and you start looking at them in the aggregate sense, the statistics are pretty clear that not only has there sort of been a change — a shift, if you will — of where the greatest tornado frequency is happening,” Gensini told CNN. “But these events are becoming perhaps stronger, more frequent and also more variable.”

Research by Gensini found that over the past four decades, tornado frequency has increased in vast swaths of the Midwest and Southeast while decreasing in parts of the central and southern Great Plains, a region traditionally known as Tornado Alley.

Some studies also indicate climate change could be contributing to an eastward shift in tornado alley, for instance, resulting in more tornadoes occurring in the more heavily populated states east of the Mississippi River, such as this tornado outbreak.

“It’s also very common when you have La Niña in place to see this eastward shift in highest tornado frequency,” Gensini said. “But if you look at the past 40 years, the research I’ve done … has shown that places like Nashville, Tennessee, for example — or Mayfield, Kentucky, that we saw got hit — their frequency of tornadoes, their risk of having a tornado has increased over the last 40 years.”

Tornadoes take shape under particularly specific atmospheric conditions but are primarily fueled by warm, moist air from strong winds that shift direction with altitude.

Scientists have warned that the rise in greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere is drastically changing the climate system, even causing the jet stream — fast-flowing air currents in the upper atmosphere that influence day-to-day weather that could trigger a tornado event — to behave oddly.

Jennifer Marlon, a climate scientist at the Yale School of Environment, told CNN it’s too early to say what caused the outbreak — whether natural variability or climate change — but there are “some really important signatures that suggest that this very well may be linked to climate change,” and that scientists are “observing changes in the outbreaks, not just the severity of individual outbreaks and tornadoes, but also quiet periods.”

For example, if any of the tornadoes are rated EF-5 (estimated winds of 260 mph or greater), it would end a streak of 3,126 days since the last EF-5, which is the longest stretch without since records began in 1950. The last EF-5 tornado was the Moore, Oklahoma, tornado on May 20, 2013.

It’s likely that it was simply natural forces at play, against the background of climate change.

The World Weather Attribution, a group of the world’s leading scientists that establishes the link between climate and weather, for instance, has recently unveiled findings that the warming climate neither intensified the flooding in Vietnam that killed 138 people this summer nor the Madagascar drought that led to the country’s food scarcity.

Still, a recent report by the World Meteorological Organization found that an extreme weather event or climate disaster has occurred every day, on average, somewhere in the world over the last 50 years, marking a five-fold increase over that period and exacting an economic toll that has climbed seven-fold since the 1970s.

As such climate disasters worsen and expand in scope, Marlon points to significant factors that increase disaster risks across society during these times including worsening weather disasters, increasing exposure due to growing populations, and more vulnerable infrastructure assets.

That’s already taking shape in Mayfield, Kentucky, where officials say the city’s main fire station and some of its police assets have become inoperable as a result of the devastating tornado system. Now, authorities are looking for alternative ways to address emergency calls.

“All these things are feeding into increase disaster risk, with many more consequences, including the fatalities, of course, but also enormous economic damages,” she said.

As the climate crisis accelerates, more people will be vulnerable to the most severe consequences of extreme weather events. Experts say cities shouldn’t put off adaptation plans any longer, and instead treat them as a larger emergency response system.

But Gensini said one thing is certain: regardless of climate change, these types of tornado disasters will continue to worsen as humans alter the landscape and build larger, more sprawling cities.

“We have more assets and more targets for the severe storms to hit,” he said. “So even if you take climate change out of the equation, which is very likely to make the problem worse, we still have this issue of human and societal vulnerability.”

Christmas typhoon at Philipines left thousands of families homeless and hungry

Homeless at Christmas

Prolonged displacement and suffering

Effects of the climate crisis

A long road to recovery

What role climate change has played in the weekend tornadoes in US