NATURAL DISASTERS AND ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE Preface

Abstract

As we prepare this book for publication, communities here in Australia are emerging once again from a summer of disasters – widespread flooding, bushfires, and record heatwaves. Communities that have just recovered from the last summer of extremes (see Chapter 25) find their newly repaired roads, bridges, buildings, and homes once again destroyed or damaged. The question on the minds of many is whether this is the shape of things to come – is this the reality of climate change? But, this book is not about attribution of extreme events. It does not seek to tease out the signal of climate change from the background noise of day-to-day variability. Rather, its goal is to use the empirical evide..