This map shows that natural disasters happen absolutely everywhere, except here?

what's with this giant blank spot across the American Southwest?

As most places get riskier as our climate warms, should we all just move here?

Is this actually a climate refuge?

Well, we dug into the numbers and found out that the most important thing this map reveals is what's not on it.

And it turns out that what was left off is far more sinister than I ever could have expected.

The first thing you need to understand about natural disasters is just how common they are.

95.5% Of US residents live in a disaster declared county.

This is Amy Chester.

Her organization created the Disaster Atlas, which is a map that shows every disaster declaration in the United States from 2011 to 2024.

We asked her how disaster declarations work and why they matter.

So if you are a governor, you go to the President of the United States and say, "Hi, can you give us a disaster declaration?"

If the President of the United States says yes, then FEMA steps in and you get all of this disaster money that's supposed to help you financially build back to where you were before.

Maps like these provide valuable information about what's happening across the country.

80% Of states have experienced 10 or more disaster declarations during this time, California being the highest with 39.

But some of the hardest hit places aren't areas we typically think of as disaster zones.

Vermont may be the most striking example.

Eight of the 10 counties with the highest number of disasters are here, largely because of repeat flooding.

You may remember the catastrophic floods of 2023 when parts of the state were hit with nine inches of rain in just 38 hours.

Flooding is one of the more widespread hazards, but certain regions are especially vulnerable to specific disasters, like hurricanes along the Gulf and East Coast, convective storms and tornadoes across the Midwest and Mid-South and wildfires and mudslides along the West Coast.

So is it really the case that this area just lucked out and doesn't get many natural hazards?

There's a big portion of the country that doesn't have disaster declarations and we thought that was super interesting.

So we looked in further and realized that they are the areas that have really high heat days.

Let's zoom in on Phoenix, the hottest city in the United States.

In July of 2023, there was an incredibly deadly heat wave.

That record-breaking July 2023 heat wave saw 303 heat deaths just in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is.

For comparison, during the July 2023 Vermont floods, only two people died across the entire state.

And that heatwave in Phoenix was actually the deadliest natural disaster of 2023 in the entire United States.

But here's the weird and sinister thing that I alluded to earlier.

In Phoenix, there was no disaster declaration.

You don't get disaster declarations for mortality.

You only do it for economics.

So in many ways, no one is actually kind of seeing the impact of these events.

So wait, we don't even consider the deadliness of an event when it comes to declaring official disasters?

Well, that seems problematic, but trust me, it's even worse than you think.

But before we move on, we need to talk about heat.

First, it is the deadliest kind of weather in the US.

Second, it's one of the only hazards that's getting deadlier over time.

Since the 1990s, we've seen a 63% increase in heat deaths, which means we're failing to adapt.

And third, it's really hard to figure out how many people are dying from it.

Everywhere and especially in the global south, the mortality due to extreme heat is severely underestimated, even in places like Australia and America, in part because it's so insidious, it's what we call a silent killer.

It doesn't just happen like un- unfortunately, unlike a flood or a tornado or a fire, it's not instantaneous.

And also the way it's recorded is very different.

That's because most people who die in a heat wave actually die from something much more common like a heart attack or stroke that was triggered by the heat stress.

But by analyzing individual death certificates, Marina and her team at the Lancet Countdown found that we are far undercounting global mortality.

The actual number of global deaths for 2023 associated with heat exposure estimated in over half a million deaths.

And because heat causes crop failure, Marina estimates that half a million is still a massive undercount.

According to their calculations, there are 120 million more people that are food insecure due to the increased frequency and intensity of droughts and heat waves, which is another reason heat deaths are so hard to quantify.

Their impacts last for a very long time and heat doesn't just kill.

Even if we focus only on the economic impacts of extreme heat, which is the primary metric for federal disaster declarations, the costs are enormous.

Heat exposure reduces our capacity to do physical and intellectual labor.

With record high heat over the past few years, we're seeing very rapid increase in the loss of labor hours due to heat exposure.

Obviously, the most affected sectors will be sectors where people work outdoors, the agricultural sector, the construction sector.

And those lost hours add up fast.

In 2024, heat exposure caused an estimated 640 billion potential work hours to be lost around the world, nearly doubling the annual average from the 1990s.

And in total, monetary losses is now above the one trillion US dollars being lost annually due to that labor capacity loss.

I'm starting to think that maybe extreme heat waves deserve a little more respect in the disaster department, because if heat is becoming more deadly and more expensive, even as air conditioning spreads around the world, what are we getting wrong?

And in the US, would it help if extreme heat were officially treated as a natural disaster?

Let's start by looking at the legislation that governs nearly all of our disaster policy.

This is talking about a singular event that is weather related, or it could be terrorism, it could be an oil spill, something that's considered a federal disaster.

So for instance, you can't get a disaster declaration for drought because it happens over many, many months.

And this act actually governs how the money flows afterwards, what's considered an event, who has the ability to be able to ask for an event and a lot of the technical things.

Buried in all of that legal language, there are two really important ideas.

First, the federal disaster system is built around the idea of an event with damage you can easily document, like a land falling hurricane or wildfire burning through a neighborhood.

And second, the system is mostly designed to respond after that damage has already happened.

Now, there are a couple problems with this system, especially when it comes to heat.

The disaster of extreme heat is largely invisible.

So when FEMA is trying to figure out whether something counts as a disaster, heat easily slips through the cracks.

There are a lot of ways that we could measure this as economic impact, but we don't because we don't have a really good way of understanding how many days are lost from work, for instance, or if people had gone to the emergency room and didn't have insurance and now taxpayers are paying for it.

So there definitely is an economic impact, but it's really hard for governors to show at that moment.

The other big problem is timing because communities would benefit most from that money before the heat wave hits, not after.

You as a community need to suffer before you get the bazillions of federal dollars that could come after an event, but you've already suffered.

So why, why are we doing that?

When it comes to extreme heat, the most important work is prevention and that starts with focusing on the people who are most likely to die, which are older adults, especially over the age of 65, people with underlying health conditions, outdoor workers, people living alone, and people experiencing homelessness or chronic lack of access to shelter.

The good news is that one of the most important interventions is surprisingly simple.

A lot of people who die in heat waves are alone indoors and in some cases they stay there because they think they're safer inside even when they don't have air conditioning.

All the while, the temperature inside their home is climbing to dangerous levels.

So part of prevention is really basic.

Know who your neighbors are and check on the people who are vulnerable.

But at a large scale, this requires a shift in how we think about heat.

We're still not realizing that heat is not a lovely summer for the beach.

It's actually a life-threatening event for vulnerable people and we need to respond in a health emergency mode.

That's why prevention has to mean treating heat like the public health emergency that it is and building systems that reach people before the danger becomes deadly.

And one of the hottest states in the country, Florida has seemingly moved in exactly the wrong direction.

Since 2024, Florida passed legislation that prohibits cities and counties from requiring employers to make accommodations for high heat days.

Not only that we're not gona have it, we're actually forbidding localities to have these requirements.

Just sit with that.

As heat becomes more dangerous, some communities aren't just failing to protect the most vulnerable people.

They're prohibited from protecting them, that's especially confusing because prevention works.

It saves lives and it saves money.

A US Chamber of Commerce study found that every dollar not invested in disaster resilience today can cost communities up to $33 in lost future economic activity.

So waiting until after disaster strikes isn't just ineffective.

It's also incredibly expensive and that brings us back to the map.

That conspicuously blank spot in the Southwest was never showing us where disasters aren't happening.

It was showing us where our definition of disaster is failing.

If a flood washes out a road or a wildfire burns down a neighborhood, we can see it.

We can quantify the damages.

But if a heat wave kills hundreds of people quietly, our systems can act like almost nothing happened.

So yes, heat should be treated like a disaster, but more than that, it should be treated like a disaster that we can prevent because in a hotter world, the goal can't just be rebuilding after catastrophe.

It has to be preparing to keep people alive before it happens.

As always though, I'd love to hear from you, how do you stay cool in the heat?

Any crazy heat wave stories?

Let us know in the comments and don't forget to like and subscribe and we'll see you next time on Weathered.