In June 2016, Rodrigo Duterte, the former mayor of Davao City, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, easily defeated four other candidates in the country’s presidential election. Within hours of taking office, the new president began to make good on his campaign promise: killing those whom he called the “sons of bitches” involved in the country’s illegal narcotics trade. The first corpse, described by the police as an “Unidentified Male Person” in his 20s, turned up around 3 a.m. in an alley just a five-minute walk from the sports complex where Duterte had declared victory. The victim had been shot once behind the left ear. The killers had placed a cardboard sign on his chest that read I AM A CHINESE DRUG LORD.

Over the following months, the killings spread across the Philippines. Men wearing masks burst into homes and shot people in front of their children. They snatched others off the streets in unmarked cars and disposed of their bodies in trash heaps. Dealers—most selling crystal meth, or shabu, the drug of choice of the Filipino poor—as well as addicts, former addicts, and small-time criminals became targets. National Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa described a rising tide of bodies: “The dead who were just found floating along canals, the dead who were dumped along the road with their hands tied and their faces, eyes, and mouths taped.” Dela Rosa classified those deaths as unsolved homicides. In the first six weeks of Duterte’s presidency, according to the police count, 899 people were killed in “deaths under investigation.” In many other cases, the police took responsibility but always claimed that they had acted in self-defense. Three years into his administration, when I traveled to the Philippines to report on the drug war, the number of estimated extrajudicial killings neared 30,000.

Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country is, on one level, a powerful story of disillusionment. The granddaughter of a Manila newspaperman, Evangelista grew up in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 “People Power Revolution” that brought down the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, an exhilarating transformation that she describes early in the book. It was “one part myth, two parts magic, peopled by giants, all thunder and power and bright yellow hope.” A prodigy on the debate stage in college, she embraced journalism as a means of safeguarding the country’s hard-won democracy. Evangelista began her career as a reporter for the country’s biggest broadcaster, ABS-CBN, where she distinguished herself covering political killings. In 2011, she joined Rappler, a feisty online start-up co-founded by the investigative reporter and future Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa.

[Read: Maria Ressa on how to fight fascism before it’s too late]

Then, five years later, Duterte swept into office. Evangelista seamlessly segues from her own life story into a riveting police procedural. Joining up with a band of photographers who were sometimes called “nightcrawlers,” a term derived from a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, she prowled the slums of Manila after dark, chasing tips and interviewing survivors, family members, neighbors, and police. All along she was tormented by the question: How did a country that had won admiration for its peaceful ousting of a dictator choose, one generation later, a murderous autocrat as its leader? Evangelista reaches back into her own past to examine how infatuation with charismatic authoritarians, apathy, and instincts for self-preservation might have induced people to make such a choice. In one withering moment, she describes her shock and sense of betrayal upon learning that her grandfather, whom she had believed was a fervent democrat, was actually a supporter of Marcos.

Marcos was a U.S.-backed kleptocrat who ruled the Philippines for two decades, most of that time under a state of emergency that granted him absolute power. On August 21, 1983, a year before Evangelista was born, the opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. defied Marcos’s warnings and returned to Manila from a self-imposed exile in the U.S. Moments after stepping off China Airlines Flight 811, he was shot dead by a soldier in front of horrified journalists and supporters. Marcos denied that he was behind it. But abuses and corruption were sapping the government’s authority. In 1984, I visited Samar, a large, jungle-covered island about 400 miles south of Manila; a leftist priest told me that “80 percent” of the island was in the hands of the anti-Marcos Communist New People’s Army. Two years later, U.S. President Ronald Reagan pressured Marcos to hold elections, and Corazon Aquino, Ninoy’s widow, defeated him. The Philippine armed forces backed Aquino, and the dictator and his wife, Imelda, flew into exile in Hawaii. “We Americans like to think we taught the Filipinos democracy,” declared the CBS correspondent Bob Simon that night, referring to the country’s nearly five decades as a U.S. colony. “Well, tonight, they are teaching the world.”

At the moment that Aquino was consolidating her power in Manila, a young prosecutor was beginning his political rise in Mindanao. The son of the provincial governor, Duterte was a crudely charming figure with a violent streak: At 27, he had shot and wounded a fellow law-school student. The circumstances of the shooting were unclear and no charges were filed. Elected Davao City mayor in 1988, he allegedly created the Davao Death Squad, which gunned down drug dealers, drug users, petty thieves, and, eventually, political rivals.  

Reports about Duterte’s hit squads were well-known when he announced his candidacy for president in 2016. And he made no secret of his intention to run Malacañang Palace the same way he managed Davao’s city hall. “There’s been enough warning during the campaign,” he declared just after his victory. “There will be no blaming here. I told [the drug dealers] to stop. Now if anything happens to them, it’s on them. They asked for it.”

Some Filipinos dismissed his talk as political rhetoric. Others had grown weary of the ineffectual outgoing president, Benigno Aquino III (the son of Ninoy and Corazon), and disgusted by corruption. Evangelista describes an oft-used scam in which airport security staff planted bullets in the luggage of travelers at Manila’s airport and then demanded payoffs in return for not arresting them. Duterte—a macho populist with a fondness for profanity and a “tell it like is” message—exerted an almost-religious hold over his supporters. Like Donald Trump, to whom he has frequently been compared, Duterte had a performer’s instincts, an  earthy humor, a misogynistic streak (he often made comments seeming to endorse rape, which his fans shrugged off as jokes), and a visceral message. Aware that many Filipinos were terrified to walk in their barrios after dark, Duterte promised to take care of the problem—without regard to cumbersome, tainted judicial procedures. “She saw him on television,” Evangelista writes of one Duterte enthusiast, in what could also be a description of a MAGA acolyte. “It was like seeing Jesus.” To vote for Duterte, Evangelista writes, in one of the many lyrical—and chilling—passages that run through the book, “you had to believe in certain things”:

You had to believe, for example, that he was a righteous man … You had to believe that God had a peculiar preference for deadly autocrats, because the presidency is destiny and Rodrigo Duterte was destined to lead … You had to believe that a mayor who kept peace by ordering the undesirables out of his city could succeed in a country where undesirables were citizens too. You had to believe the intended dead would be drug lords and rapists, only drug lords and rapists, and not your cousins who go off into Liguasan Marsh to pick up their baggies of meth. You had to believe there would be a warning before the gunshots ring out.

Duterte’s language became more vicious as the killing campaign intensified. In August 2016, he claimed to have 144,202 names on a drug watch list. “If your name is there, son of a bitch, you have a problem, I will really kill you,” he declared. Street dealers, meth addicts, and small-time pushers would “have to perish,” he said later in his administration. He would “slaughter those idiots,” and hang them with sharpened barbed wire so that “when you drop, you leave your head behind when your body falls.” But the exact circumstances of the murders were deliberately kept vague, and a new vocabulary arose that reflected the murkiness. People weren’t murdered, they were salvaged—an English-language euphemism derived from the Spanish salvaje, or “wild.” Tokhang, a portmanteau from the Visayan words for “knock” and “plead,” was allegedly a police policy that encouraged low-level dealers to identify themselves and surrender, but that often resulted in their executions.

Evangelista introduces a memorable cast of villains, heroes, and victims. Lieutenant Colonel Domingo, the commander of a prolific death squad, is presented as an affable killer fond of bestowing nicknames on reporters. Domingo takes a liking to Evangelista and, against her wishes, keeps calling her “Trish”—a sinister reminder of who holds the power in their relationship. Efren Morillo, a fruit vendor who survived a police attack that killed four others, found the courage to testify against the murderers. After Morillo’s testimony and the abduction-murder by the police of a South Korean businessman in October 2016, Duterte seemed to turn his back on the hit squads, calling the police “corrupt to the core.” Evangelista was one of the first journalists to report on a shift in tactics: the use of local vigilante groups to carry out the homicides, with the police compiling target lists and directing their movements in the shadows. No hard evidence links Duterte to this change of policy, but Evangelista makes the case that the president had, with a wink and a nod at least, given it his approval.

[Read: The paradox of Rodrigo Duterte]

By the time I arrived in the Philippines in 2019, Duterte’s drug war was still playing out—though the numbers had dropped significantly from the dozens of corpses that had filled Manila’s streets each night early in his presidency. When I visited Malacañang Palace, Duterte’s spokesperson was unrepentant about the killings, insisting that hundreds of police had died in shootouts while trying to arrest drug dealers. And Duterte remained wildly popular. At a political rally I attended in Davao for the senate candidates from his party, supporter after supporter told me how grateful they were that Duterte had cleaned up their neighborhood. This may have been more perception than reality: In 2020, the head of drug enforcement for the Philippine National Police said that “drug supply is still rampant” and that the “shock and awe” of the Duterte years had not worked.

Duterte reburied Marcos, who had died in exile in Hawaii, as a hero at the national cemetery in Manila. Obliged by the Philippines’ constitution to step down after one term, he endorsed Marcos’s son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Jr., to be his successor. The country had come full circle. Evangelista’s book is an extraordinary testament to half a decade of state-sanctioned terror. It’s also a timely warning for the state of democracy in 2024. Eight years ago, most Filipinos shrugged off Duterte’s homicidal rhetoric as political buffoonery. The horrors that followed suggest that demagogues with a violent message might well be taken at their word.

On December 1, 1900, at an intimate concert hall in Vienna, a respected local baritone gave the premiere of some early songs for voice and piano by Arnold Schoenberg. Today this music, though written in an elusive harmonic language, comes across as exuding hyper-Wagnerian richness and Brahmsian expressive depth. But the audience in Vienna broke into shouts, laughter, and jeers. From that day on, as Schoenberg ruefully recalled two decades later, “the scandal has never ceased.”

The author Harvey Sachs relates this story, and describes the songs sensitively, in his new book, Schoenberg: Why He Matters. As Sachs makes clear, the “scandal” only got worse. In 1908, Schoenberg premiered the Second String Quartet, his boldest step thus far toward breaking the tethers of tonality—the musical language of major and minor scales and keys that had been around for centuries. Plush with wayward harmonies and arching vocal lines, the music is dark, moody, and entrancing. But most of the audience heard only piercing dissonance and rambling stretches of ugly sounds. One reviewer deemed the piece not a composition but a “pathological case,” a “worthless assault” on the ears of listeners, for which the composer should be “declared a public nuisance.”

Sachs’s book, targeted to music-loving general readers, is less an impassioned defense of an indisputably influential composer than an earnest attempt by an engaging writer and insightful music historian to explain Schoenberg’s significant achievements and understand the lingering resistance to his works. These scores still “fascinate many people in the profession,” Sachs asserts, but “continue to meet with apathy, and often downright antipathy, on the part of most listeners.”

Sachs, the author of the critically acclaimed biography Toscanini: Musician of Conscience, admits to being an unlikely candidate to take on this task. He calls himself “Schoenberg-curious rather than a Schoenberg expert.” But this, he hoped, might make him more trustworthy to countless Schoenberg skeptics among classical-music devotees. If they find Schoenberg’s music baffling, off-putting, and excessively challenging, Sachs understands why and doesn’t really disagree.

But by maintaining that “most listeners” still cling to this perception of Schoenberg and those who followed in his path, Sachs winds up compounding the problem, at least to this admitted Schoenberg lover. The stigma is reinforced. Also, he only glances at a larger related issue that has consistently nagged at me.

The early 20th century was an era of fervent experimentation and radical ventures in all of the arts. Think of what emerged in other fields during the early 1920s when Schoenberg was writing his first 12-tone pieces. For a decade or more, cubist paintings such as Picasso’s 1921 Three Musicians had been literally shattering norms of representation by breaking up and reassembling shards of images into abstract configurations. James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922, was banned in the United Kingdom for content deemed obscene when the real shocker was pages upon pages of seemingly stream-of-consciousness writing. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author opened in 1921 and overturned notions of what narrative drama could be. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at once rattled and riveted readers of poetry in 1922.

[Read: Can classical music make a comeback?]

A century later, one has to reserve a timed ticket to get into a Picasso exhibit at most museums, or a retrospective of Kandinsky. Culturally curious people, young and old, seem to accept that a “challenging” painting—or modern dance work, or play, or independent film—can be exciting, mind-expanding, really cool, and sort of out there precisely because it’s challenging. Why in classical contemporary music do so many people equate challenging with intimidating—or even infuriating?

Classical music was deemed, even by some musicians (though a minority, I’d argue), to have gone wrong in the middle decades of the 20th century. And Schoenberg is still seen as the main culprit.

Sachs genuinely comes across as trying to make a strong case for Schoenberg as a challenging, yes, but consequential composer. He does an admirable and efficient job telling the story of Schoenberg’s life, career, and struggles (the book is just more than 200 pages), and shows how early experiences fortified his later resolve to radically shake up contemporary music.

Born in 1874 in Vienna to a lower-middle-class Jewish family (his father kept a shoe shop), Schoenberg was drawn early to music. At around 16, he had to take a job as a bank clerk after his father died. But he made musical friends and became ever more focused and ambitious. His tenaciousness paid off. A composer who in his youth was compelled to teach himself compositional forms by subscribing to an encyclopedia’s instruction guide, he eventually wrote two books on harmony that are still in use and is considered among the century’s most significant teachers. At 23, in 1898, Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism, and his iconoclasm played out here as well. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, he reconverted to Judaism at the most dangerous moment, becoming an outspoken advocate of Jewish solidarity and defiance. In 1933, he emigrated to America, where he wound up living in Los Angeles, across the street from Shirley Temple, and found a friend, and tennis partner, in George Gershwin.

Those early years in Vienna, when he faced disdain, left him both defensive and determined, and ready to try on the role of visionary prophet in contemporary music. Schoenberg “would see himself as a lonely David using his slingshot to fend off hordes of cultural Philistines who were incapable of grasping, or unwilling to grasp, the beauty and the importance of his ideas and his work,” Sachs writes.

That attitude emboldened Schoenberg as he confronted what he saw as the “crisis” of tonality that came to a head in the early 20th century. The musical system that listeners were comfortable with (think of Maria teaching the von Trapp children do, re, mi) was a kind of harmonic hierarchy in which melodic lines and chords could wander off and become ambiguous as long as the music never lost complete touch with the main key of any piece, or passage, of music. But the music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had grown so harmonically unmoored that Schoenberg felt, with some justification, that the functionality of major and minor keys had seriously dissipated.

He dared to cut the bonds, to write pieces that embraced this ambiguity and took it further, radically so. For some years, he wrote freely atonal pieces, in which extreme harmonic ambiguity became for him a new norm. Finally, he thought, if composers, he especially, were writing music that didn’t revolve around one key but gave equal weight to all 12 notes, why not systematize this?

He devised a system based on invented “tone rows,” as he called them, a series of all 12 notes put in an order without an established central key; the music would progress without any one note repeated until its turn came up again. This may seem a terribly cerebral conceit. (Sachs wisely doesn’t go into the details.) But two points are crucial. First, the technique actually allowed for all kinds of permutations, because the rows could be gone through forward or backwards, or inverted, or transcribed, and much more. Second, Schoenberg wanted audiences to forget about the methodology and just listen, even if the notes in a piano piece seemed all skittish and jumpy, if the sonorities sounded ungrounded, flinty and dissonant; listeners should give themselves over. Once he devised the technique, he felt liberated. In 1921, still swept up in a flush of nationalism he would later regret, Schoenberg boasted to a friend that he had discovered something that would assure “the dominance of German music for the next century.”

That’s where he was wrong. He had not discovered the next stage of music, because, it can be argued, there’s been no next stage. Music can change, even dramatically, without progressing to some higher, complex realm. And tonality was not in such a crisis after all, as Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Britten, Shostakovich, Copland, and a whole roster of composers would prove as the 20th century unfolded.

Rather, 12-tone music was an exhilarating leap into the beyond, an invitation to let go, to dispense, at least for a while, for the duration of a piece, with what Leonard Bernstein in his Norton Lectures at Harvard maintained was an inherent need in human beings from all cultures for music that loosely adheres to some kind of tonal harmonic mooring.

My strongest objection to Sachs’s account of what happened comes up for the first time in the book’s prologue, when he writes that Schoenberg’s 12-tone compositional technique and its offshoots, which were “virtually obligatory among composers struggling for recognition in the third quarter of the twentieth century,” have been “either abandoned or drastically altered, often beyond recognition” by most younger composers. He adds that atonality and the 12-tone technique “have proved to be dead ends for most listeners and for many—perhaps even most—professional performing musicians as well.”

This seems unfair and too sweeping. Did cubism prove a dead end because few painters today emulate Picasso’s specific approach and technique? For a couple of decades, abstract expressionism seemed to dominate and drive contemporary painting. Some influential critics maintained that this approach defined modern art. Similar claims were made by influential, if regrettably dogmatic, 12-tone composers in the 1960s and ’70s who held teaching posts at universities. They dominated the intellectual high ground over their timid colleagues who, as they saw it, still hewed to various kinds of tonality.

All such pronouncements were wrong. Abstract expressionism remains an exhilarating development that still influences painters whose works look little like those of Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock. And the impact of the bold experiments pioneered by Schoenberg is ever present.

Go to a contemporary music concert at any conservatory or university. It’s safe to say that none of the young composers on the programs are writing anything close to strict 12-tone works. Still, in almost every piece, you hear intrepid elements of atonality, pointillist riffs, the tart harmonic twang and flighty figurations characteristic of Schoenberg & Co., even when the overall musical language may be drawing from many styles—tonality in the manner of Copland or Britten, minimalism, folk music, jazz, electronica, whatever. And film scores for decades have been thick with stretches of gnarly, 12-tonish sounds to convey mystery, angst, and intensity. Looked at this way, Schoenberg’s atonal and 12-tone works, far from being dead ends, were door openers.

Even in his own time, as Sachs shows, Schoenberg was not as dismissed as is generally assumed. He did have powerful champions and his share of gratifying successes. In a compelling chapter, Sachs discusses the ecstatically received 1912 Berlin premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, a piece that boldly blends modernist atonal music with Berlin cabaret. Written for an actress and a small instrumental ensemble, the piece sets 21 poems by Albert Giraud (translated into German) relating the exploits of the timeless Pierrot character, who appears in a moon-drunk state, singing of lust, violence, nightmares, and heresy. The voice part, tailored to the actress’s talent, is written in a kind of song-speech that Schoenberg called “Sprechstimme.” The music “‘fulfills’ the words and adds dimensions to them,” Sachs writes, “to such a degree that one feels as if the words have grown out of the music itself, in a sort of onomatopoeic symbiosis, which of course is not the case.”  

Sachs explains the dearth of prominent orchestras’ performances of major Schoenberg works by pointing to the inherent complexities and awkward technical difficulties of the scores. Sachs writes admiringly of the brilliant violinist Hilary Hahn’s recording of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, but points out, quoting Hahn, that she needed a couple of years to train her hands to play it and to uncover the music’s “grace, wit, lyricism, romanticism and drama.”

But I could imagine many superb violinists devoting two years to mastering the concertos by Tchaikovsky or Brahms, among the most difficult in the canon. In 1970, on Beethoven’s 200th birthday, I heard Rudolf Serkin play a monumental performance of Beethoven’s daunting Hammerklavier sonata at Carnegie Hall. Some weeks later, I was able to congratulate him in person for that unforgettable Hammerklavier. He looked at me and said, “It took me 50 years.”

Also, assessing the significance of a composer’s works by the current popularity of his pieces is not quite right. The stigmatization of Schoenberg has stuck, unfortunately. Yet I find that with just a little help, open-minded listeners respond. In classes I’ve taught, I’ve won over the Schoenberg-averse by playing a Bach musette and then the musette from Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Op. 25, which is almost like a 12-tone transformation of a Bach suite. Except for the way the pitches were picked, the Bach and the Schoenberg are strikingly similar, the same short-short-long dance rhythm, the same skipping, impish character.

[Read: Is old music killing new music?]

The argument that classical music has never recovered from the wrong turn taken in the middle decades of the 20th century seems dated and downright wrong. Judging by the reactions of audiences I’ve been part of over the past 20 years, even just in New York, the climate for contemporary music has gotten more and more welcoming. It seemed an apt reading of the cultural moment when in 2020 the New York Philharmonic largely eschewed commemorating the 250th birthday of Beethoven and instead inaugurated Project 19, a series of works commissioned from 19 women composers to commemorate the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. The Metropolitan Opera has given New York premieres in recent seasons of unapologetically challenging—yes, that word—but arresting operas, including Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin and Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel. This season, in an inventively contemporary and vibrantly choreographed production, the Met is presenting its house premiere of Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, a long-overdue hearing of a breakthrough work from this Pulitzer Prize–winning composer. Davis has written that he attempted to blend “the improvised and subversive spirit of the blues” with the form and structure of “the post-tonal harmonic language of Berg and Stravinsky.”

Despite what you may hear, many works by Schoenberg and his circle, especially his devoted student Alban Berg, written during those tumultuous decades of change, have been embraced by audiences. In the fall of 2021, when an ailing Michael Tilson Thomas heroically conducted a program with the New York Philharmonic ending with Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, the high point, for me and for many, was a magnificent performance of Berg’s 1935 Violin Concerto, with Gil Shaham as a soloist. This wrenching, sublime piece folds passages of tonal music, including strands of a plaintive Bach chorale, into the complex musical language that Schoenberg pioneered.

The performance received a long, ardent ovation from an audience of attentive listeners who didn’t seem to know that they were supposed to find 12-tone music alienating.

In the New York subway, vendors like María scrape by selling chocolates, as part of a wave of Ecuadorian migration.

The Louisiana wildfire that upended Katie Henderson’s life was barely a blip on this year’s string of catastrophes. On August 24, just after she’d brought her 7-year-old son home from school, she spotted a red band of flames speeding across the treetops, crackling like static on the world’s largest television. She had time only to hand off her son to a neighbor and herd the family’s four dogs into a horse trailer hooked to their pickup. (Their cat, Windy, she plopped into an unzipped backpack.) As she and her neighbor caravanned out through the backwoods, fire filled her rearview mirror. Her house was so badly damaged that day that her family hasn’t yet been able to move back.

On the scale of disasters, this one was small—Henderson’s house was one of the few affected, and the overall damages will likely be orders of magnitude less than those of the billion-dollar disasters the country racked up this year. Go just a mile down the dirt road to the highway that leads into Evans, a town of a few hundred people, and everything looks fine, Henderson told me. But this localized wildfire is part of a category of catastrophe, sometimes called “low-intensity disasters,” that experts are becoming more concerned about. Although major disasters tend to be the most studied and understood, low-intensity disasters, collectively, may be just as essential to track in the long term.

These events are small enough to escape widespread notice, but they happen frequently, accumulating damages that rival, and in some cases surpass, a major one-off disaster. Periodic flooding on a highway, for instance, might start as a commerce-reducing nuisance, but over time it can shape livelihoods and landscapes. “You’re reducing the foundations of support very gradually, from one event to the next,” Roger Pulwarty, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who also conducts research with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), told me. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”

The way these smaller disasters add together challenges the traditional ways of defining and measuring catastrophes. Insurance companies, for instance, have long divided catastrophes into primary and secondary, or peak and nonpeak perils. Nonpeak perils—events such as floods, thunderstorms, and wildfires—are considered more localized, more frequent, and less costly than peak perils—sudden disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Recently though, even compared with hurricanes, “we’re seeing more flood damage from just extreme-rainfall events that overwhelm local infrastructure,” as well as other localized disasters, Carolyn Kousky, a climate-risk researcher with the Environmental Defense Fund, told me. In fact, globally, nonpeak perils have been the biggest drivers of insured disaster losses every year since 2013 (except 2017—a particularly catastrophic year marked by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria), according to a 2021 report from Howden, an international insurance broker that tracks disaster damage. Nonpeak perils are also becoming more frequent and severe, according to Ernst Rauch, the chief climatologist for Munich RE, a reinsurance company that collects data on global disaster damage. As of the first half of this year—marked by about 24 separate billion-dollar disasters in the United States, according to NOAA, and earthquakes in Turkey, Syria, and Morocco—nonpeak perils still formed the bulk of losses worldwide, Rauch told me.

[Read: What your insurer is trying to tell you about climate change]

Taken together, frequent, low-intensity disasters can surpass the damage of acute, intense ones. Loretta Hieber Girardet, the chief of risk knowledge, monitoring, and capacity development for UNDRR, thinks of Colombia in 2010 and 2011, when the country experienced a strong La Niña event: The ensuing floods, landslides, mudslides, and torrential rain affected 93 percent of the country’s municipalities and caused more than $6 billion in direct economic losses. “It wasn’t one single disaster but thousands of smaller-scale events” that eroded communities over time, she told me.

At UNDRR, Hieber Girardet’s team has defined a small disaster as one that involves fewer than 30 deaths or fewer than 5,000 houses destroyed, and has found that from 1990 to 2013, 99.7 percent of all global disasters met those criteria. In the U.S., NOAA is responsible for measuring big, billion-dollar disasters; now “we’re starting to consider looking at sub-billion-dollar events, even in the present year,” says Adam Smith, the lead researcher on NOAA’s billion-dollar-disaster reports. Pulwarty, who works for both organizations, said that, in general, looking at the number of people affected and houses damaged, and even traffic wait times and internet-connectivity losses, could better clarify these events and their accumulating damages; tracking them on a national level could illuminate what is an almost “invisible issue.” And giving the damage of low-intensity disasters, a sticker price would help justify the investment in managing and preventing them.

Right now, low-intensity disasters fall into a gray area for assistance: They’re too destructive for a community to handle easily on its own, but not destructive enough to warrant the aid that comes from federal disaster declarations. Because tracking systems are set up to monitor large disasters, national governments might not realize the extent of smaller events’ damage, and even if a community can manage a low-intensity disaster in the near term, it may not have the resources in place to build back more resiliently. “It’s a big gap,” Hieber Girardet said, “and that’s something we’re seeing around the world.”

Falling into that gap can feel like “you’re forgotten about,” Heidi Rochlin, the district superintendent in charge of Antietam Middle Senior High School, told me. In July, heavy rains in Berks County, Pennsylvania, bloated a nearby stream, which ran through the school for days, flooding the basement, knocking out the school’s water and electrical supply, and depositing thick mud and dead fish in the first-floor hallways. The students are spread for the rest of the school year among a local church, a community college, and the district’s two other buildings. Rochlin estimates that the school’s damages total $21.8 million—before adding anything new to guard against future floods—but the Berks County disaster wasn’t large or severe enough for the school to be eligible for federal relief. (The county has applied for and received funds through other means, including low-interest loans made by the U.S. Small Business Administration in coordination with FEMA, but the process can be long and piecemeal.)

Experts are also concerned about damage from changes that happen in slow motion. Ongoing climate stresses—“whether that’s sea-level rise, broad changes in temperature, an extreme rainfall event, or drought—these longer-term things can be equally economically disruptive” as a major climate disaster, Kousky, the EDF researcher, told me. When Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s former chief resilience officer, and his team surveyed residents, they found that people’s concerns were about changes gradual enough to have escaped widespread notice: Their basement had started flooding every time it rained; 10 years ago, their backyard was 100 yards long, but storm erosion had shrunk it closer to 50. These problems might not be a huge problem in any immediate time frame, Ervin told me, but over time can have a “catastrophic impact.”

[Read: A recipe for climate disaster]

Think about the flooding just from the higher tides that sea-level rise creates. Maybe the floods begin as a minor annoyance for a coastal community; one day a month, you can’t leave your house because the water is too high, Kousky said. But even one day a month of not getting to work or taking a child to school adds up. Bigger disasters can change where people live overnight, but quieter stresses like these, she said, could reshape how and where we reside just as much.

All of this has convinced Hieber Girardet and the other experts I spoke with that these slower-onset events must be tracked and measured. Her UNDRR team will convene scientists this month in Germany to determine how they can actually do so. “Maybe we can start small with a few phenomena, like sea-level rise,” she said, and from there, generate global methods of tracking their effects.

Still, as important as quantifying these events will be, Pulwarty told me, “we don’t have to know these numbers precisely in order to act.” These low-intensity disasters are, in essence, the most manageable, if societies invest in risk reduction. Fine-tuned data will add detail to our picture of the future, but we can already start building for the one that scientists are seeing now.