气候变化领域集成服务门户

"I feel there is a risk of undermining the human agency — all the things that we could do to reduce exposure or vulnerability to be better prepared," says Katiuscia Fara, a regional advisor with the World Food Program.

There are two dimensions to a disaster: a physical hazard, like heat, and the societal or environmental vulnerability it encounters, explains Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the voice behind the Weather West blog. For this reason, emergency management professionals have long criticized the use of the phrase "natural disasters." There’s even an international "No Natural Disasters" campaign, which rejects the idea that natural hazards are the sole cause of disasters and seeks to reframe the conversation around the social and political causes.

"I think the problem is that humans aren't adapting nearly as quickly as the climate is changing," Swain says. "That mismatch, I think, is where we're going to see ‘climate disasters.’"