It's sometimes difficult to know where to donate, but there are ways people can narrow their search. Jessica Alexander: Americans should give money to a reputable humanitarian agency - either local or international - that is already on the ground there. Philanthropy News Digest: What can Americans do to help the people of the Philippines? And what shouldn't they do? For more information about how you can contribute to relief and recovery efforts in the Philippines, click here, here, and here). Over the weekend, PND asked Jessica Alexander, author of Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid, to rate emergency relief efforts in the Phillipines, what Americans can do to help, and whether she thinks climate change is contributing to the destructiveness of weather-related natural disasters.

The ferocious intensity of Haiyan also led experts and officials in the Philippines and elsewhere to connect the storm to climate change - a contention likely to be debated for years to come. As has been the case in many recent natural disasters, aid and humanitarian agencies responded quickly and with the best of intentions but were stymied by sub-standard and/or damaged infrastructure and logistical bottlenecks. The destruction that ensued was catastrophic: more than 3,900 people killed and tens of thousands missing, half a million homes destroyed, and millions of people displaced. When Typhoon Haiyan slammed into the central Philippines on November 7, the storm's winds of 190 mph-plus unofficially made it the strongest cyclone ever to make landfall.

Chasing Chaos by Jessica Alexander