In the Eye of the Storm Toolkit
When disaster strikes, it rarely strikes equally. People who are made vulnerable because of race, gender, income level, disability, and age often feel the impacts more acutely than others in their community. For this reason, the NAACP has crafted a toolkit called In the Eye of the Storm: A People’s Guide to Transforming Crisis and Advancing Equity in the Disaster Continuum. The toolkit offers modules for equitable planning, risk assessment, response, and recovery throughout the disaster lifecycle. Users will also get a step-by-step understanding of relevant legislative processes and information on how to advocate for more equitable emergency management policies.
Resources to Protect Your House of Worship
Sadly, as recent events have shown, houses of worship are often the site of emergency situations, including acts of intentional violence. These resources created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency are meant to help faith-based communities prepare for such events. The collection includes information on preparing for threats, mitigating risk, and funding opportunities to help groups purchase physical safety measures.
Puerto Rico Hurricanes: Status of FEMA Funding, Oversight, and Recovery Challenges
This report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) looks at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s oversight of federal funds allotted to assist Puerto Rico in recovering from 2018 hurricane damage. The agency has had to resort to a manual reimbursement process for distributing funds while it establishes internal controls for its central recovery office. According to the report, FEMA officials have found the interim system challenging because of a lack of expertise and guidance on the manual reimbursement process and concerns that municipalities are not being fully reimbursed for work completed. The GAO will continue to monitor the situation and issue recommendations later this year.
Child Poverty, Disasters, and Climate Change
Disasters can greatly impact children not only at the time of the event, but through the course of their lives, and those experiencing poverty are even more at risk for long-term impacts. This report looks at child poverty in India and Kenya through the lens of different datasets on household and child poverty, disasters, and local climatology. The report finds that climate change and natural hazards can reverse years of development gains and affects children and adolescents directly and indirectly by affecting the services and systems central to their wellbeing.
State of the Art in Computational Simulation for Natural Hazards Engineering
This Natural Hazards Engineering Research Institute (NHERI) SimCenter report reviews simulation requirements and software tools for natural hazards engineering of the built environment. The report summarizes commonly used simulation software that is widely known and used for research in academia and industry, with particular emphasis on open source or other software hosted on the NHERI DesignSafe website or otherwise easily accessible to researchers. A summary table of the simulation software tools is provided as an appendix to the report.