How to Survive the Climate Emergency As natural and human-caused disasters increase, researchers are assessing the risk to essential resources all over the planet. Here are the biggest challenges we face. Author: Apr 22, 2021 8:00 AM EDT As natural and human-caused disasters increase, researchers are assessing the risk to essential resources all over the planet. Here are the biggest challenges we face. We’ve faced a lot of emergencies lately. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was the most active and one of the costliest on record. A February cold snap left as many as 4 million Texans without power. Record-breaking wildfires have burned millions of acres in the Western U.S. and Australia. There have been more than 137 million cases of Covid-19 globally since the pandemic began, with 2.95 million deaths. The virus virtually shut down the global economy for a time, and even with vaccines on the scene within a year, new troubles have emerged and new surges are occurring.