In July 2021 torrential rainstorms battered Europe.
The deluge wiped out entire villages, washing away homes while people slept.
Across the continent more than 220 died.
And it triggered a sentiment that's pretty common in rich countries:
"You don't expect people to die in a flood in Germany.
You expect it maybe in poor countries but you don't expect it here."
But here's what's people don't realize:
just one year before, on the other side of the world,
even heavier rains hit a poorer, more densely-populated country — they just killed fewer people.
Cyclone Amphan claimed 128 lives when it struck Bangladesh and India.
Don't get me wrong: it was a horrific tragedy
that also destroyed houses, crops, and livelihoods.
But had that same storm hit Europe it could have been far more deadly.
"Bangladesh is streets ahead of any other country in the world."
So why did Germany bury more victims than Bangladesh?
Let's look at what a country on the frontlines of climate change
can teach the rest of the world.
Delving through historical footage shows that Bangladesh wasn't always equipped to handle
severe storms.
To understand what's changed we need to go back half a century
— to the biggest and deadliest cyclone recorded in human history.
On November 11, 1970, Cyclone Bhola barreled into Bangladesh, or what was then East Pakistan,
and West Bengal in neighboring India.
It's hard to imagine the scale of this single disaster.
The cyclone killed between one-quarter and half a million people.
The government response was so poor it fueled protests that helped trigger a civil war which
turned Bangladesh into an independent country.
One reason cyclones like Bhola are so deadly is because they hit some of the most densely populated parts of the planet.
You might have seen this population map that went viral on social media.
The same number of people live in huge blue part as in the tiny red part.
That's 5% of the world in each.
And Bangladesh sits right there in the red.
But it's not just the density.
Look from the side and you see Bangladesh is one of the lowest-lying countries on Earth.
More than half the population lives less than five meters above sea-level.
These two factors combined mean that when cyclones
like Bhola have struck, the storm surge has overwhelmed islands and tidal flats that are home to millions.
"1970 was a key turning point, both in terms of Bangladesh becoming an independent country and
then as an independent country investing heavily in improving our ability to manage the risk of cyclones."
This is Saleemul Huq,
director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development.
He's one of the world's leading experts on climate adaptation.
"We can typically warn and move over two to three million people every time there's a cyclone warning
and the deaths have come down very, very significantly."
Cyclone Bhola prompted the World Meteorological Organization to dedicate a program
to predicting tropical cyclones and reducing the risk of disasters across the world.
And it worked: In the 50 years since, Bangladesh has been struck by several cyclones.
But even though the population of this tiny country has more than doubled, the death toll has fallen.
This graph shows the number of people that died
in eight of the biggest cyclones of the last half-century.
Storm fatalities have dropped from 6-digit figures
to double-digit figures in the space of a few decades.
Bangladesh accomplished this in three main ways.
The first is technology:
they built weather stations and forecasting systems.
These computers use weather data and satellites to monitor areas of low pressure
and predict the strength and path of cyclones, sometimes days in advance.
The second is infrastructure.
In the 1970s, the country had only 42 cyclone shelters.
Now, it has more than 12,000 shelters defending its coastline.
When storms strike, these can house nearly five million people.
But clever computers and infrastructure aren't enough to bring death tolls down if people don't respond to the warnings.
We know this because in 1991,
super cyclone Gorky killed 138,000 people.
It showed that there was one factor
the government had neglected:
culture.
Even though authorities knew it was coming, most residents hadn't wanted to evacuate.
What's more, the warnings had been directed mainly at men.
They rarely reached women, who were often at home, not allowed to
speak to strangers and reluctant to stay in mixed gender shelters.
"It's not only about the cyclone, it's about the whole community, the whole society."
This is Bayes Ahmed, a scientist who's studied how Bangladesh can reduce its vulnerability to cyclones.
He says the rise in the number of women working and studying has made it easier to reach them with warnings.
"Now our women are more empowered. Connectivity is increasing and that has challenged the social barrier."
This cultural shift is the third big reason cyclones in Bangladesh have become less deadly.
And it feeds back into how designers build infrastructure.
Remember those cyclone shelters we looked at?
They now have separate toilets for men and women to make them safer.
Planners have started adding ramps so wheelchair users can get in.
Many of the shelters even double up as schools — in which children learn
about responding to cyclones as part of the curriculum.
Almost everyone has a smartphone and people pay attention to the warnings.
On top of that, the government has trained thousands of local volunteers to go door-to-door
in their communities warning people to evacuate.
"You learn from your mistakes, you learn from the devastation.
It took 50 years, we say, it took us 50 years to achieve this resilience."
Of course, none of this means Bangladesh is safe from cyclones — far from it.
People are losing homes again and again.
The damage to the economy is growing.
There are several hundred thousand Rohingya refugees without access to the good cyclone shelters.
And climate change is even threatening to undo this progress:
Tropical cyclones will get stronger and stronger as the world keeps burning fossil fuels.
But the lesson it holds for other countries is that people can adapt to extreme weather.
Let's turn back to Germany — and look at a litany of colossal mistakes.
From July 13, 2021, heavy rains hit Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The downpour, supercharged by global warming, led to floods that killed more than 220 people.
"As scientists, we were really shocked by the scale of the impact of the floods in Germany."
This is Liz Stephens, a climate scientist at the University of Reading who's studied
global flood alert systems.
"We certainly shouldn't be seeing that number of deaths from that kind of flood event."
Experts and residents are still waiting for an official investigation into what exactly went wrong.
But some clear patterns have already emerged.
Here's a public prosecutor in the German city of Koblenz, shortly after the floods,
telling journalists he's opened a case of negligent homicide against local authorities.
He's talking about the town of Sinzig, where 12 people living with disabilities in a care home were killed by water.
"We can assume that with an earlier, more clear warning about the impending danger, or especially
with a more timely and explicit evacuation order, these people’s lives could have been saved."
The European Flood Awareness System had indeed issued alerts warning of life-threatening
floods to national authorities earlier in the week.
But at municipal level, local officials ignored the warnings and failed to evacuate people until it was too late.
In some communities, sirens stayed silent.
In others, people didn't take them seriously enough.
Other structural factors were also involved:
the authorities sent warnings via smartphone app but not text message.
Rescue efforts were harder because phone lines and roads hadn't been built to withstand such floods.
Above all: People in towns and villages built on floodplains across the country just couldn't
imagine they were in danger.
So even though the science predicted the rains, the culture to avert the looming disaster just wasn't there.
"The care home for disabled people in Germany is a perfect example of that.
We really need to begin to understand who are the vulnerable people living in areas at risk of flooding
and understand what their needs are from the early warning system."
So what lessons can rich countries take away from this?
First, that the climate has already changed.
Governments need to recognize that this threat isn't going anywhere, it's getting bigger.
Second, that's why we need to start investing much more.
People need to know when extreme weather will hit and have a safe place to go to when it does.
Third, that technical solutions aren't enough on their own.
A warning system doesn't work if people don't hear it in time — or if they don't take it seriously.
"In Europe, we're very good at large investments in the science of climate change and that
gives us those big weather forecast models that can predict things further ahead of an event.
But what we really need to do is understand
the decisions being made in those local communities."
"These countries, they do not lack resources, they have the resources. But probably there
is a lack of planning, reliability, trust."
The challenge for poor countries like Bangladesh is how to adapt to even more extreme weather.
The question for rich ones like Germany is how much longer they can afford to wait before they listen and learn.
Climate change is scary but we aren't powerless against it.
That's why we're making videos like this every week: to show you what can actually be done.
So if you liked what you saw, don't forget to hit subscribe
and let us know in the comments what you thought of this video.