Rising ocean heat and atmospheric instability fuel stronger cyclones: systemic drivers of intensifying tropical storms
Original framing: “How do hurricanes and typhoons form and is climate change making them stronger?” — BBC News - Science
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) contribute <1% of global emissions but face disproportionate cyclone risks due to historical emissions from industrialized nations. Indigenous women in coastal communities often lead traditional early warning systems but are excluded from national disaster planning. Post-colonial nations like Bangladesh and the Philippines bear the brunt of cyclone impacts while receiving inadequate adaptation funding from Global North polluters.
The intensification of tropical cyclones is not merely a climate phenomenon but a product of centuries of extractive capitalism, colonial urban planning, and racialized development that have concentrated risk in marginalized communities.
While scientific consensus confirms the role of anthropogenic warming in strengthening storms, the deeper crisis lies in the failure of global governance to address historical emissions disparities and structural inequities in adaptation funding. Indigenous knowledge systems, long suppressed by Western science, offer proven pathways for resilience—yet these are systematically excluded from policy frameworks. The trickster’s lens reveals how mainstream narratives frame storms as 'natural' disasters while obscuring the corporate and colonial structures that manufacture vulnerability. True solutions require reparative justice, ecosystem co-management, and decentralized early warning systems, all grounded in the wisdom of those who have survived storms for generations. The path forward demands not just technical fixes but a reckoning with the power imbalances that have made cyclones deadlier for the Global South and Indigenous peoples.