Well, there's also flooding in Central Europe. At least 19 people have died. The Czech Republic, Romania, Austria, and Poland have over 5,000 troops deployed to support people there. The mayor of Nissa in Southern Poland called on 40,000 residents to evacuate to higher ground. Heavy downpours have caused a lot of damage across the huge area where Storm Boris, bringing vast amounts of rain and snow over the weekend has hit. There have been a lot of dramatic rescues. This was the moment that one person was winched to safety in Strava in the Czech Republic, the local river bursting its banks, flooding the area. And Polish police shared this footage on social media of one of their helicopters involved in a rescue, winching residents to safety. The rescues, the response, the clear-up, the preparations for more flooding continues. The storms are now also reaching Italy, where warnings for heavy rain, strong winds, and floods have been issued for much of the country. Well, I'm joined by Dr. Jean-lucas Pescoroli, Associate Professor in Disaster Resilience at University College London. Thank you for joining What do you attribute the damage that we're seeing here in Europe and indeed across Myanmar?

Obviously, climate change behind it, but could more be done to protect people?

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much for your time. We see that there are different dimension in how this event unfold. One is the dimension of hazard, the other one is the dimension of vulnerability. In terms of hazard, we are seeing compared to before, a different level or a different pattern of recombination. And we see that into some extent in both events. We see, for example, that the low probability, high impact, the term that, for example, there were in the flood in Europe, certain particular weather conditions or the interdependencies between what is happening in Myanmar, flood-causing mudslides, are becoming the norm, are becoming something we need to consider on the the other dimension. So the way the climate is impacting the hazard is recombining them together. So what we perceive as low probability is becoming something different. It's giving us a new recombination, something that we need to consider in the planning process. On the other dimension, we see between these events in completely different contexts that there are some common vulnerabilities, or what we call in some of my projects, like agile or is a multi-agile, this common point of failure on which we need to prepare.

So this common vulnerability includes the vulnerability of critical infrastructure that when it's disrupted, affect the recovery efforts and affects Everything in society, from the capacity later on of enterprises and the private sector to recover and the capacity of deal with effective evacuation and effective delivery.

Okay. Sorry, Jean-Jo. We're looking, obviously, established places where people live and where people work. So what should governments and communities be doing now, urgently, to give themselves more resilience to these hugely changing weather patterns that we're seeing all over the world?

Thank you for this question. Look, this is very critical. We need to move. We were used to think all this as medium term. This is not medium term. This is happening now. So we need to proceed in different ways. And some of that are actually starting to be activated. One, we need to understand how to integrate better technology within an organization. So not just the technical part, but how to have procedures over which follows action. For example, we have a warning how this is going to be part of business continuity and organizational resilience. For example, the United Nation Office for Disaster Risk Reduction is going to release soon some universal KPIs to support the private sector on this. Other elements that we need to consider is new tools that start from the very basic exercise, like tabletop exercise done by local authorities, national authorities, such as stress testing. Where are these common point of failure? So consider also the role of creativity in foreseeing the events that are going to come.

Okay. Well, obviously, it is a very urgent problem. We are seeing, as I said, in so many different parts of the world in different forms. But for now, Dr. Jean-luc Pescoreli, thank you very much.

Thanks to you for your time..

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