The first six months of 2011 have brought image after image of human misery and ecological upheaval.
Droughts, wildfires, twisters, floods, heat waves, extreme blizzards - just about every natural disaster you can imagine has hit just about every place on the planet.
How to handle them, survive them and how to clean up and rebuild after them are among the many issues that will be on the agenda for the 21st World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM), to be held in Toronto Sunday through Wednesday.
Nearly 1,500 government officials, scientists and business people from 40 countries will participate.
Top of mind will be the expected world food crisis that all this extreme weather is already causing, driving harvests down and prices up to record levels.
“When the major networks become weather networks, and when other news becomes sort of secondary, we are facing disaster,” says Lester Brown, founder and president of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, who will be the WCDM’s opening speaker. “When you have a lot of local disasters, droughts and floods and heat waves as we’re now having, reducing the food supply, then you have a global disaster.”
Brown has written dozens of books on the environment and served as an adviser to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Last year he was named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2010.
“The U.S. is a good example,” he says. “We have simultaneously some of the worst droughts and forest fires, on the southern plains, at the same time as we have some of the worst rain and flooding, on the northern plains. Soils are so wet we are having trouble getting the crops in. That extends into Canada, too, with getting the wheat planted this year. The USDA has already reduced the estimate of the wheat harvest in both the U.S. and Canada because of the late planting.”
“We will probably never be faced with a food shortage (here),” says WCDM director Chuck Wright. “We will be faced with high food prices because we’re exporting so much product to Third World countries that it’s driving prices up.”
Here in North America, at least in the short term, this will probably mean a bump in the price of bread, a blip in the cost of beef. Our food budgets are about 10 to 15 per cent of our disposable income.
But in most countries, where billions are living on the edge of starvation and spending up to 80 per cent of their income on food, it will mean conflict, famine, refugee crises and death.
The Arab Spring is said to have been touched off by rising food prices in Tunisia and Egypt.
But things can get worse, much worse, says Brown, whose most recent book, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, is a forceful argument for trying to head off the disaster he’s convinced is being wrought by climate change.
He says many nations will simply collapse and there will be unimaginable political headaches.
Which is why there will be more to the conference than food shortages, says Wright.
“In the past, obviously after 9/11, we focused heavily on terrorism and the London bombings. So there was a big terrorism aspect to the conference. Now we’re looking at natural disasters as a growing concern.”
