Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Chaz Eby, Deputy Executive Director of the Maryland Department

of Emergency Management, about how states and communities can and will prepare for disasters arising from climate change.

They discuss the concept of resilience and what that looks like as climate extremes and natural disasters rise.

Let's listen.

Chaz Eby, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks for the invitation, Stephanie. So today I want to talk to you about emergency management

in the context of climate change. So your job in the past, there's a hurricane coming right away,

everyone batten down the hatches, make sure people know if they should evacuate, if they should, you know, what they should do to prepare.

But with climate change emergencies, things look a little different.

They look very different.

We've seen a significant change in the landscape of the disaster world.

There's more extreme weather.

These are the big ones. These are the things that everyone hears about on the news, the disaster world. There's more extreme weather. These are the big ones. These are the things that

everyone hears about on the news, the wildfires, extreme heat, the frequency of major hurricanes,

including one that's affecting the United States right now down near Florida and Georgia. And that's

true. Since 1980, there's been an average of about eight incidents and disasters costing

$1 billion. And in the last five years, there have been 18 events annually, and that's adjusted

for inflation. And 15 in 2023 alone, it's only the end of August. So the disaster world's changing

...