It comes as officials declare 2024 the hottest
year on record, with temperatures breaching the target of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time.
9 News US correspondent, Lauren Tomasi is in Los Angeles and told The Front Page no matter where you look, there’s devastation.
“It’s street after street, block after block of homes that have just been brought to the ground by this fire that has moved through so quickly.
“Australia and New Zealand are so used to seeing bushfires, but this is an urban fire,” she said.
Tomasi has been on the ground in the Pacific Palisades, one of the hardest hit areas.
“I spoke to one woman, Suzanne, in the Eaton fire, her house was in Altadena and I was there as Suzanne got back to her property. It was brought to the ground by these fires. She built up that house with her partner who passed away from cancer a few years ago.
“She said all of her memories are inside that house. It is so tough to see what is unfolding here. It is person after person, story after story of heartbreak. It really is horrific,” she said.
The Los Angeles fires are just the latest natural disaster the US has faced in recent years.
Two back-to-back Hurricanes caused billions in damage in the country’s south last year, while Hawaii had its devastating wildfires two years ago.
And over the next month, New Zealand marks two years since devastating weather events in the upper North Island left damage we’re still clearing up from.
Victoria University of Wellington professor Jonathan Boston told The Front Page the kinds of events we’re witnessing have been amplified and made worse by climate change.
“If we fail to prepare, the costs and consequences will be all the greater and some of those consequences could be extraordinarily dire.
“As we [have] witnessed in watching the fires in California in the last week, there are still people saying that this has nothing to do with climate change. It’s all due to bad planning, bad allocation of resources, and so on. Whereas the scientific evidence is pretty clear.”
Boston’s latest book is A Radically Different World: Preparing for Climate Change. It warns that “societies must prepare for a more perilous future”, and discusses the idea of relocation to avoid the extinction risks of climate change.
Examples include Westport in 2030 facing rising sea levels and flooding, and Wellington’s CBD in 2065 contending with its proximity to the sea.
While in some cases, Boston said, we might adapt by improving protective structures — in many cases, it won’t be technically feasible or cost-effective.
“So the only realistic option in those situations will be to literally remove existing physical structures, houses, businesses, infrastructure and relocate them to safer locations.
“To do this, we will need a very well-developed systematic planning framework that assesses the risk to particular coastal communities and provides local authorities or national Government with the powers to conduct a process of planned relocation over a period of time.
“Indeed, one of the big concerns I have is that if we fail to prepare adequately and in a proactive and precautionary way for what is coming at us from the future, then we run the risk of undermining our capacity as a society to cope, thereby undermining our democratic institutions,” he said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more from the ground in LA.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
