What happens to wildlife in disasters?
Wildlife are killed, injured, and displaced by disasters. Even if they survive the initial disaster, their habitat and food sources are destroyed. Water becomes polluted. They’re at risk of developing life-threatening diseases. They’re forced to leave their habitats to find another viable place, and that often means going into human habitats, making them more vulnerable to being hit by cars, hunted, or killed as predators and pests.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know the extent of the damage that disasters wreak against wildlife. We have the technology to assess the amount of land destroyed and how many people were killed, displaced, or are missing. But we can rarely say how many wild animals have been impacted, so they are easily overlooked when we add up the costs of devastation.
When researchers do try to quantify the impacts on wildlife, the figures are shocking. The University of Sydney, for example, reported that 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by the Australian megafires of 2019-2020. But what is the wildlife toll from the wildfires that devastated more than 18 million hectares of boreal forest in Canada this summer? Or from the megafire that burnt more than half of the Greek Dadia-Lefkimi-Soufli Forest National Park, home to most of Europe’s birds of prey?
Probably billions as well.
Disasters can destroy entire ecosystems and undo years of conservation in mere minutes.
Loss on such a scale will have impacts for years to come. Vulnerable and endangered species will struggle to reproduce at a high enough rate to keep them from disappearing altogether.
How can we help wildlife survive disasters?
Animals can’t prepare for disasters like we can. They face increasing destruction and devastation from wildfires, floods, droughts, and war, but are not currently included in the EU’s disaster management plans and policies.
Most national action plans for the conservation of vulnerable species also don’t include disasters on their list of threats. These plans take account of other dangers—such as poaching, logging, and human encroachment—but overlook disasters even if the species’ habitats face a higher risk now.
This is important because experts have an idea of the population number and locations when there’s an action plan, so they can see what the disaster’s effect is. For example, scientists studying a lynx equipped with a radio collar in the Canadian boreal forest found it 300 kilometres from its territory after this summer’s wildfires, while its home range is usually 25 square kilometres.
Learning more about how species react during and after disasters can help us find solutions for other species, too. For example, experts saw that some Hermann’s tortoises survived wildfires in southern France in 2021 because they had dug deep holes under rocks to protect themselves from the heatwave that came before the fire. Forestry management and wildlife authorities could create more hiding places that wildlife could use if they can’t find a way out.