How to protect communities and build resilience to natural disasters

“It was a category five cyclone of enormous strength, creating winds so forceful that palm trees, designed by nature to withstand strong winds, were being stripped down to the trunk and snapped in half,” says John Leeves, remembering the effect of Cyclone Winston.

In 2017, the storm left Fiji, and other Pacific island nations, devastated. Homes were flattened and families uprooted. “It was probably the most intense cyclone to hit Fiji on record,” adds Terry Atalifo, one of the senior meteorologists working for Fiji Meteorological Service during Cyclone Winston.

Leeves, a senior geotechnical and natural disasters engineer at Tonkin + Taylor, based in Auckland, New Zealand, recalls the devastation he witnessed when visiting a number of villages destroyed in Fiji. “A lot of them were located on the coast, so as the eye of the cyclone came in, you not only had incredibly strong winds to contend with but also a massive storm surge,” he says.

In total, 44 Fijians lost their lives. The devastating health impact of the disaster has lasted right up to today, with some communities left without water for sanitation and drinking, and food sources polluted or destroyed. “About 62% of the population was affected during Winston – that’s equivalent to 540,000 people,” says Atalifo. “And the impact is huge, especially for the communities. And there was a lot of impact to agriculture, which was the sector that was most badly damaged.”

Coastal communities are increasingly threatened by climate change, and the Alliance’s work is being applied to good effect elsewhere. 

Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, is home to several coastal communities, along with millions of dollars of infrastructure and is subject to existing coastal hazards that are anticipated to become more severe with climate change.  

“The area was severely impacted in the 1930s by an earthquake, which saw some of the land rising by 2m (6.6ft) and some of it dropping by 1m,” says Richard Reinen-Hamill, the sector director for natural hazards resilience at Tonkin + Taylor. “It’s a highly [geologically] active and dynamic part of the world.”

Reinen-Hamill and his colleagues and partners produced The Clifton to Tāngōio Coastal Hazard Strategy, which is a plan for communities along a 22km (13.7-mile) stretch of Hawke’s Bay to adapt to the challenges of coastal erosion. The plan, which includes recommendations such as the managed retreat of communities away from at-risk areas, is a New Zealand first in terms of the scale and complexity of the assessment over an area this large, says Reinen-Hamill.  

“I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom,” says Reinen-Hamill. “I guess what gets me out of bed is the fact that I feel we’re making a difference. We’re helping communities and empowering the communities to do something. This is a sentiment shared across the Alliance.”

Flooding is the most common natural disaster, with 44% of disasters associated with it worldwide. It affected more than two billion people worldwide between 1998 and 2017. In 2021, after heavy rain across Europe there were severe floods in Germany. 

“When we look back at it now, it’s clear how big the impact of that incident was,” says Florian Schnetzer, a senior environmental consultant with HPC Germany who are an Inogen Alliance Associate. “Approximately 70,000 people lost their homes, with a further 180 or more losing their lives. This alone shows the importance of putting precautionary measures in place.”

 “Our focus has had to become incredibly more climate-driven,” says Sara Austin, the mapping and geospatial lead for Antea Group USA, another Alliance member. “We’re trying to keep this data up to date because we know that there’s a risk that this information can change.” 

Preparedness, adaptation and resilience will be the best strategy in the future, says Schnetzer. “We cannot put a stop to climate change,” he says. “But, by using our digital models mapping to track water volume and precipitation rates, we can manage how we prepare for it.” 

Back in Fiji, they are seeing just how important this is. “Climate resilience is almost like the cornerstone of all our national, regional and global development,” says Atalifo. “It’s almost like the end goal of everything that we do nowadays. And in this part of the world where our economies are small, the infrastructure is quite vulnerable, here in the Pacific, the impacts are quite profound.”

Climate change presents complex challenges, so resilience and preparedness require international collaboration between communities and industry professionals worldwide. While each new climate challenge is different, some lessons can be applied globally to prepare other regions if they are tailored to each situation with local expertise.

“The lessons that we have learned from Cyclone Winston helped us to improve the way we do things in terms of early warning and early action,” he says. “Even though it has done a lot of damage to Fiji, the lessons learned from Winston has made Fiji more resilient.”