World: Why Climate and Disaster Risk Governance Must Work Together

Country: World Source: Asian Disaster Preparedness Center By Irfan Maqbool In April 1815, Mount Tambora erupted on the island of Sumbawa, in what is now Indonesia. It was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history and perhaps one of the earliest documented global disasters to produce cascading impacts across Asia, Europe, and North America. Volcanic ash and sulfur particles spread through the atmosphere, reducing sunlight and lowering temperatures across large parts of the world. The eruption itself lasted for days. The volcanic winter it triggered lasted nearly three years. 1816 became known as the Year Without a Summer, marking the beginning of famine, epidemic, and displacement that moved continent by continent, with no one grasping their common cause. When families in New England harvested nothing from their frostbitten fields in the summer of 1816, they did not know why. When farmers in Bengal watched their neighbors die by the thousands in a cholera epidemic in 1817, they did not know the connection either. When Lord Byron, moved by the gloom descending around him, wrote his 1816 poem ' Darkness ' and described the condition of a world in crisis in a single searing line, 'Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless,' he too did not know its cause. Those who suffered had no name for what connected them. What began as a geological event in one location swiftly spread through food systems, public health, economies, and governance on different continents, sometimes as a direct shock and sometimes as an additional stressor on societies already under strain. The world did not learn quickly. In the century and a half after Tambora, disasters continued to take an enormous toll. Earthquakes, cyclones, and floods claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in multiple events, particularly in the first half of th...

Original source: Relief Web