#WhatHappenedWithAcapulco and Hurricane Otis, why was it so violent and how to help?
Hurricane Otis became the strongest storm in recorded history to hit the Pacific coast of Mexico and, along with the devastation it caused, has left several lessons: the urgency of improving the ability of climatologists to provide certainty in their forecasts, the difficulties encountered in calculating when a storm will suddenly explode to give way to a nightmare scenario, but above all the relevance of rethinking economic development.
It is a fact: more storms similar to Otis are coming, which should force us to take the acceleration of climate change seriously, reconsider civil protection and disaster prevention, adaptation and mitigation policies, plan reconstruction processes that prioritize the well-being of people, modify urban development plans, construction regulations, among other tasks.
Today, with the threat of hurricanes, none of Mexico’s coasts are protected.
For now, the scientific community sends a strong message: disasters are not natural phenomena, but socially constructed events, whose origin is found in the lack of planning, disorderly urbanization, conditions of inequality, poverty and insecurity. The logic is very simple: if we continue emitting greenhouse gases, changing land uses and, therefore, reducing environmental services, what we are going to have is the exacerbation of all the impacts.
With the collaboration of researchers Gian Carlo Delgado Ramos, from the UNAM Institute of Geography, and Antonina Ivanova Boncheva, from the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur, the context is offered around the tools to measure and act against climate change, as well as the route to follow to counteract it.
First, we must consider that the way in which we intend to act in the face of the tragedy in Guerrero reveals, to a large extent, the usual recipe. There is a nature of urgency that allows us to establish the conditions to return to a kind of normality after the tragedy. For example, electricity, considering that without it there is no water and thus a series of problems are unleashed that are even connected to people’s health. That said, there is a complexity in restoring the essential minimum, but another tension lies in locating the route for a sustained recovery and, there, addressing the urgent may be the root of the problem.
Faced with the onslaught of Otis, more than 10,000 light poles were collapsed and the priority was to put them back up when, in reality, if medium and long-term resilience were considered, the CFE would have to consider a plan to bury them and offer electricity under land. The issue is that there is no time to do that and the same system is rebuilt again, just as vulnerable. The possibilities of this changing are very limited because, in the absence of resources, urgency prevails. Thus, solutions are built not in the ideal way but in the possible way.
Gian Carlo Delgado Ramos and Antonina Ivanova Boncheva, also members of the Mexican Network of Climate Scientists, share several red flags: these events will be repeated with equal or greater force, Mexico does not have the necessary resources to prevent hurricanes (the country has few hurricane hunting planes, while 30 radars are required when currently there are only 5), the weather system is not adapting to the threats caused by climate change, so there is a lack of better warning systems early and observatories.
There is more: the Risk Atlases of the states and the country have to include climate change forecasts because, until now, they are not preventing it. In general, the Atlases are quite poorly done, with few exceptions, but the weakest link is in the municipalities. Faced with this, Conacyt should support and coordinate basic climate science research for the development of robust climate models.