Can Cities Get Smarter About Extreme Weather?

Researchers believe outdated thinking and knowledge systems have made recent weather disasters worse, adding to the more than $110B USD in weather-related damages just in 2017.

While improvements to make cities more climate-ready usually focus on infrastructure improvements like levees and flood walls, some researchers contend that cities also need to update their information systems to better prepare for and anticipate extreme climate events.

Weather events once classified as 500-year events have recently occurred multiple times in the same decade in Houston, Texas. Houston also saw a 167% increase in the intensity of heavy downpours between 2005-5014 as compared with 1950-1959 while the flooding from 2017’s Hurricane Harvey was Houston’s third “500 year-flood” in just the last three years. Officials in Houston responsible for flood preparedness had downplayed the need for better knowledge systems after the first two flood events asserting that the two prior floods were isolated events.