Research and Practice Highlights

As collectively-experienced traumas, disasters can have both physical and mental health consequences; however, questions remain as to how different types of disaster exposure can negatively influence various health outcomes. As such, there is a need to develop and test robust measures of disaster exposure, particularly ones that accommodate both direct and indirect exposure pathways. The Sandy Child and Family Health (S-CAFH) Study is an observational cohort study of approximately 1,000 randomly-selected New Jersey residents who were living in nine of the New Jersey counties most exposed to Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Using S-CAFH data, this study considers a number of domains in which the well-being of adults and households was impacted by the storm, establishes the incidence of selected health conditions that emerged in the first few years after Sandy, and explores the association of disaster exposure and health outcomes. In this analysis, we examine the “dose” of disaster exposure among residents at both the community level utilizing storm surge data and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) assistance claims data, and at the individual level using measures developed for direct physical harm (i.e. loss of life, physical injury, or loss of pet) and direct contact with storm related elements (i.e. flood waters, debris, or mold). We then look at the “response” to these multi-level exposures in the form of physical and mental health outcomes. We aim to describe the frequency and type of exposure for this population and explore the relationship between exposure and physical and mental health in an effort to characterize the long term impacts of Hurricane Sandy.

Keywords: exposure, health outcomes, Hurricane Sandy

Successful response to extreme floods may be due to policy learning—changes of beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and goals—in response to new information and experiences. This learning can lead to adaptation of local policies to increase the resilience of communities faced with risk from extreme events. Transparency of policy processes, changes in resource availability, type and extent of damage, stakeholder participation in decision processes, and beliefs about the causes and consequences of the problem (i.e. the flood) may determine the success of policy learning in a community. By analyzing these variables across seven flood-affected communities in Colorado’s three hardest-hit counties from the September 2013 floods, this study improves our understanding of the factors that can help increase policy learning, leading to long-term recovery and community resilience. Using (1) in-depth interviews with key flood recovery managers, (2) two years of surveys with these same subjects and community stakeholders, and (3) coding of meeting documents from the seven communities, this study examines these variables longitudinally. Early study findings suggest that the extent and type of damage can have a powerful effect on the beliefs of key stakeholders in the flood recovery process and that damage influences risk perceptions in ways that may alter recovery efforts. Additionally, the availability of resources and the extent of damage may influence the types of collaborative stakeholder processes held during community recovery. These variables may all eventually influence policy learning and change during recovery.

Keywords: extreme events, policy learning, recovery processes, stakeholders, risk perceptions

The main research question that the study posed was: What components may constitute integrated assessment of human perceptions of emergencies, and how may this assessment contribute to the effectiveness of emergency preparedness? The research developed conceptually and initially examined empirically a novel concept called “perceived secureness,” which was defined and constructed as a mathematical proportion of perceived preparedness and risk perception. The concept of perceived secureness is designed to help better understand and incorporate lay citizen’s perceptions of emergency management and public policy. The current empirical examination viewed in parallel the national, local and household settings, focusing on perceptions regarding war and earthquake in the Israeli context. The research results reflect, among other, the “added value” of the concept of perceived secureness. Thus, while both perceived preparedness and risk perception were found significantly higher in all settings (national, local and household) in the case of war than in the case of earthquake, their proportion (i.e. perceived secureness) was found higher for earthquake than for war. The novelty and the added value of the research results indicate that it should be fruitful to move forward with larger samples and a wider variety of types of large-scale emergencies and geographic locations.

Additional research projects and interests include the following topics: the challenges of inter-organizational cooperation and alternative solutions; the strategic role of the emergency management profession and comprehensive interdisciplinary education; study of groups with increased vulnerabilities in disasters; conceptual issues in disaster research; the recent earthquakes in Nepal; and cultural issues in disaster research.

Keywords: risk communication, emergency preparedness, theoretical and conceptual models, lay citizens, human perceptions of emergencies, inter-organizational cooperation, risk-reduction, interdisciplinary cooperation in emergency management

On 4 September 2010, a Mw7.1 earthquake occurred in Canterbury, New Zealand. Following the initial earthquake, an aftershock sequence was initiated, with the most significant aftershock being a Mw 6.3 earthquake occurring on 22 February 2011. This aftershock caused severe damage to the city of Christchurch and killed 185 people.

During the aftershock sequence it became evident that the effective communication of aftershock information was imperative to assist with decision making during the response and recovery phase of the disaster. As a consequence, a joint JCDR-USGS research project was initiated to investigate:

How aftershock information was communicated to organizations and to the public;

How people interpreted that information;

What people did in response to receiving that information;

What additional information people needed, and what information wasn’t needed;

The decision-making challenges that were encountered.

To investigate the above topics, focus groups and interviews were conducted with a range of information providers and users. These people included scientists and science advisors, emergency managers and responders, engineers, communication officers, critical infrastructure operators, elected officials, and the public. Interviews and focus groups were recorded and transcribed, and key themes were extracted. Results indicate that aftershock information was required by a variety of users in formats relevant to them. Our research has found aftershock communication to be highly contextual, and thought must be given to the needs of different user groups ahead of time, so that information can be provided in the format and nature that each group requires.

Keywords: earthquakes, aftershocks, communication, Canterbury, New Zealand

The research and technical development activities undertaken by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology with funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate aims to maximize WEA message diffusion to citizens with hearing loss. People without sensory limitation can utilize multiple sensory cues to alert them to incoming WEA messages; if one of their senses does not pick up the signal another usually will. For those with significant hearing loss the senses employed for recognition of incoming alerts would be tactile and visual. However, the WEA rules do not require the use of light as an indicator of an incoming alert. Researchers developed a prototype light signaling system and conducted usability studies to determine the utility of light output in increasing WEA alert recognition. WEA rules do require the use of a specific vibrating cadence to alert users of incoming WEA messages. However, no standards are available to consumers to know how strong a vibration motor is in a mobile device. Therefore, we evaluated variable motor strengths of WEA-capable devices to determine a range of motor strength/size to (a) inform manufacturers as they develop WEA-capable phones and (b) develop criteria for selecting WEA-capable phones which fall inside the recommended range. The findings from this research will be used to inform industry, policymakers and citizens with hearing loss, empowering all to make informed choices that result in ensuring timely and effective access to alerts and warnings for people with sensory disabilities.

Keywords: Wireless Emergency Alerts, people with disabilities, deaf, hard-of-hearing, policy

A working group at the Institute for Sustainable Coastal Communities, Texas A&M University initiated a multiyear collaborative research and engagement venture called Resiliency Climate Change Cooperative Project. The RCCCP is creating a fundamentally different way to identify and tackle critical disaster resiliency and climate change challenges that threaten communities around the world. The project has brought together faculty and students from urban planning and landscape architecture, the physical and social sciences, public health, and engineering to collect new data and synthesize existing information on how coastal social and physical systems work.

Core Goals

• To expand knowledge about how the emerging triple threat (storm surge, stormwater runoff flooding, and climate change) influences community vulnerability.

• To create long-term change through co-learning between researchers and vulnerable populations around strategic community needs, and support of community capacity to actualize resilience.

Demonstration Project

A demonstration project was initiated in 2014 in two inner-city neighborhoods in the Sims Bayou watershed in Houston. These neighborhoods have a history of environmental justice and disaster vulnerability issues. A central tenet of data collection and analysis activities is the engagement of local people as active contributors. Core activities include: 1) Scientific and technical research focused on modeling future hazards (interactive effects of storm surge, inland runoff and climate), and identifying the physical vulnerability and social vulnerability of subpopulations, 2) Citizen science research focused on participatory mapping, water quality testing, stormwater drainage inspection, and rainfall collection measures, and 3) Development of a planning support system (PSS) to support data integration and allow users to develop customized scenarios of future hazard vulnerability.

Keywords: resiliency planning, climate change, community vulnerability

This research is an interdisciplinary project conducted in collaboration with Penn State University and Pitt School of Engineering. It proposes an iterative decision process involving sequential estimates of sustainable building designs, given changing exposure to hazards and risk. Through a sequential process of simulation, progressing from low to high fidelity models, and visualization, decision-makers (DM) become cognizant of the design space and tradeoffs, form preferences, and then satisfy these preferences by culling the set of considered designs to arrive at a final choice. The design of RSB is necessarily complex, encompassing multiple environmental, economic, technical and social factors at various levels assessed by multiple experts.

Our in-depth study focuses on the design of RSBs for residential and office use in urban environments threatened by earthquakes and/or hurricanes. Our model-based simulation will employ evolutionary algorithms to generate populations of soil-foundation-structure-envelope (SFSE) design realizations. Linking existing performance-based earthquake and hurricane frameworks, life cycle assessment models, and a newly developed probabilistic building recovery model, a broad array of design metrics will be established for each SFSE design. Interactive visualization software and visual analytic techniques will facilitate broad trade space exploration, allowing DMs to negotiate relationships among the various metrics to achieve designs that are both resilient and sustainable. NSF grant #1455424, 3/1/2015—2/28/2018.

The rapidly growing recognition of the detrimental impacts of climate change, particularly on the built environment and the consequential implications for society, calls for more robust, quantitative means of measuring impacts and planning for the future. The potential severity that climate change impacts will have on civil infrastructure in the near and longer-term future requires that the infrastructure policy and planning disciplines integrate actionable climate resilience planning into currently used decision and management frameworks.

Climate change compounds existing issues and raises new questions including changing temporal elements, higher levels of uncertainty, and an increased urgency to address vulnerabilities that will be further exploited by a changing future climate.

Chinowsky is currently assessing the need to broaden climate adaptation strategies to include the full range of potential climate change impacts, measures to assess risks relative to vulnerability, opportunities for robust adaptation investment strategies, and techniques to reduce risk, increase sustainability, and transfer knowledge about climate change to decision makers.

A method for quantitatively assessing the vulnerability and adaptation of civil infrastructure, particularly focused on roads, buildings, and energy, is being deployed. The focus of the methodology is to monetize damages resulting from climate change as well as the cost and benefit of proactive adaptation investment strategies.

Applications in the United States, Africa, and other regions have demonstrated the utility of the IPSSTM tool and how decision-makers today have the capability to incorporate actionable, technically sound, engineering-based results to improve resilient infrastructure and planning.

Keywords: resiliency, infrastructure, adaptation, vulnerability

This study explores the problem of scalability in complex systems in reference to the 13 May 2014 Mine Disaster in Soma, Turkey. The incident illustrates the two-way strain introduced into complex systems by sudden, unexpected events. The functions of strain and stability are measured as a joint distribution that serves a profile of resiliency for the system. We seek to develop a prototype complexity index to measure the rate of evolving strain vs. adapting stability in complex, sociotechnical systems operating in rapidly evolving conditions. Such an index assesses the current status of a sociotechnical system exposed to recurring risk while indicating, simultaneously, the status of reserve capacity available within the larger operational system that can be mobilized to counter emerging threats. A prototype complexity index, designed to identify the structure of a technical system’s operation as well as its range of tolerance to varying levels of demand, represents a fresh means of measuring the rate of adaptation to recurring risk for sociotechnical systems under stress. The index is designed to measure the functions of strain and stability at different scales of operation in reference to the overall system’s capacity for innovative response, based on the resources, skill, and knowledge of its managing organization. A well designed complexity index may be adapted to measure strain vs. stability in other sociotechnical systems operating in rapidly evolving conditions of risk. NSF RAPID grant: #CMMI-1447234, 8/1/2014--7/31/2015.

Keywords: sociotechnical systems, Soma, Turkey mine fire, complexity index, strain vs. stability

This project addresses the national challenge of defining and building resilience to hazards that would engage the ‘whole nation,’ including scientists, governmental agencies at all levels of jurisdiction, private and nonprofit organizations, and communities. We seek to identify and model interactions among physical, engineered, and sociotechnical systems that occur in hazard emergence and response as a complex, adaptive system of systems to enhance resiliency in practice and enable communities to manage the risk of hazards within existing resource and time constraints. We use the threat of Near-Field Tsunamis (NFTs; i.e., waves generated within 200 miles of shore) in a location prone to this risk, Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia as a case study to investigate methods of assessing accurately and efficiently the dynamics of NFTs generated by undersea earthquakes or landslides as they impact human communities. This process is an iterative search for information under evolving conditions to inform decisions at multiple levels of action in response to shared risk. Communities learn to assess hazards that are endemic to their environment and that have the capacity to make collective decisions informed by scientific knowledge. Models for collective action will increase collective problem solving capacity for minimizing losses and maximizing actions for innovative, sustainable risk reduction. Developing dynamic methods for managing sociotechnical systems will enhance SEES education.

Whether due to climate change, human development in risk-prone areas, or similar vulnerabilities, many communities face risk from natural hazards such as floods, wildfires, and hurricanes. Natural disasters can be considered policy failures because the interaction between humans and their environment has resulted in loss of life or property due, in part, to the past decisions made by governments and individuals to not adequately mitigate risk. Community decisions to mitigate risk and decrease future vulnerabilities, however, are dependent on several factors, including policy actor beliefs and behavior, public opinion, and framing of policy problems. These variables are directly related to the presence and types of narratives that exist within communities with regard to the risk that communities face from natural hazards, the potential for increased future risk, and the role of government policies in mitigating this risk. We ask the question: do public narratives of natural disasters provide the necessary information from which the public could expect or demand adaptation and learning from policy failure in the wake of disaster? To answer this question, this research examines public narratives in two wildfire cases in Colorado during 2012. Media coverage is used as a measure of the public narratives within communities. We find that the narratives present before, during, and after wildfires provide only brief windows during which discussion of failure, learning, or policy change takes place.

Keywords: natural hazards, public narratives, policy learning, policy failure

My current research focuses on the better understanding of how cultural variables in local contexts can thwart or improve disaster preparedness and response. In some societies disasters, such as drought, have their place in the framework of everyday life. In the case of Hurricane Sandy on Staten Island, the opposite circumstance prevailed: in spite of the accuracy of weather forecasting, the disaster of the storm had no place in the cultural context of Staten Island for many longstanding residents. Consequently, its potential impact was significantly underestimated. Using ethnographic data drawn from residents and responders, my research describes how cultural models contributed to the failure of many Staten Islanders to accurately assess and accommodate the probable risks associated with the hurricane. Local cultural characteristics, such as economic and political structures, as well as ideologies, very likely exacerbated the severity of the storm’s ultimate impact. I am currently working on a manuscript that illustrates how an applied analytic framework can be used to assist responding agencies to more quickly assess potential cultural resources and barriers in local disaster preparedness and response. The next phase of the project will utilize a complex sampling strategy across affected communities in order to test a new survey instrument to measure these cultural keys and barriers to recovery both qualitatively and quantitatively.

We need evidence-based methods for improving community disaster resilience and novel strategies for measuring results. The Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project (LACCDR) is an experiment in increasing community disaster resilience led by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, UCLA, RAND, U.S. Geological Survey and other partners. LACCDR utilizes a pretest-posttest method with control group design. Sixteen communities in Los Angeles County were selected and randomly assigned to the community resilience group or the comparison group. Community coalitions in the resilience group receive training in community resilience via the project’s toolkit. The toolkit is grounded in theory and uses multiple components to improve education, community engagement, community and individual self-sufficiency, and partnerships among community organizations and governmental agencies. The comparison communities receive training in traditional preparedness topics. After the trainings, each coalition implements its plan for improving its community’s resilience. Pretest-posttest results include: longitudinal changes in community inter-organizational linkages as measured by an organizational network survey; changes in coalition responses during table-top exercises; and changes in household resilience behaviors and attitudes measured by surveys. LACCDR reached 40,000 people across language and socioeconomic groups, and hazard exposures. Products include a toolkit, community table-top exercises, and a mapping website. Details are available in the open-source article by Eisenman et al, “The Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project—A Community-Level, Public Health Initiative to Build Community Disaster Resilience” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2014. More details on the coalitions, resources, partners and other publications are at www.laresilience.org.

Keywords: community resilience, metrics, vulnerable populations, research, public health

High societal resilience is perceived as the capacity of communities to flexibly contain a major disruption and to expeditiously bounce back—or bounce forward— following severe events. The summer of 2014 found tens of thousands of civilians in the communities in direct proximity to the Gaza Strip exposed yet again to harsh continuous attacks, launched by Hamas and other militia forces, for more than two months. The intense challenge was characterized by continuous shelling of hundreds of mortars and rockets, as well as offensive tunnels, which reached some of the localities, causing high stress, fear and chaos.

We studied the response of the civilians to this challenge by a quantitative analysis of data collected on their actual behavior during and after the events, as manifested by several parameters: Evacuation and return, demographic changes, work patterns, psychological treatments, and social conduct within the school system.

In all cases it was clearly established that all the 40 communities—in varying degrees, in reference to their social and economic composition—quickly, drastically and flexibly reduced their normal functionality for the duration of the conflict, and bounced back very quickly—within days—to a routine mode of action. This indicates a high degree of resilience. In some cases the data show signs of return to an upgraded level of social functionality, which can be interpreted as bouncing forward. This might indicate a very high rate of resiliency.

My research explores the ways that institutions structure the political economies of disaster prevention, mitigation, and recovery. Regarding “natural” hazards, I am in the middle of two projects. The first focuses on one of the key institutions of capitalism—reliance on contracts—and explores this institution’s effects on the level of disaster-related fatalities a country is likely to see in a given year. Using a measure of the relative contract-intensity in countries’ economies, I find that a nation’s economy becomes more contract-intensive, its mortality rate from natural disasters is likely to decrease. The second project involves a comparative analysis of disaster declaration institutions and employs a framework that classifies disaster declaration procedures by a) the actor doing the declaring and b) the amount of discretion that actor has in the process of declaration. The first paper from this project compares disaster declaration rules within the Philippines and Indonesia, particularly in the context of recent volcanic eruptions.

On the topic of human-induced disasters, Jeffrey Fields (University of Southern California) and I are working on a book manuscript for University of Georgia Press in which we develop a framework for analyzing the health of global prevention regimes, such as those focused on nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological). Our framework establishes a set of analytical markers focusing on regimes’ normative, behavioral, and organizational features, and we employ this framework in a comparative analysis of the health of the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapon nonproliferation regimes respectively.

Keywords: institutions, political economy, comparative politics

This study focuses on all-hazards preparedness in childcare centers and in-home childcare settings across Colorado. This is the first statewide assessment of its kind. With support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Preparedness Division, Region VIII, we developed a survey instrument that was administered online in the spring of 2014. The survey drew from the Ready, Willing, and Able framework for disaster preparedness. We asked childcare directors and supervisors to provide information on their prior disaster experience, if any; the availability of preparedness plans, by hazard type; and the occurrence and frequency of drills, training, and other disaster education activities for children, families and staff. We also asked respondents to inventory their current stock of disaster preparedness supplies and to share their disaster communication experience and support from community members and emergency personnel. The survey also included a number of items where we asked respondents to assess personal and professional levels of preparedness as well as needs and barriers for improved disaster readiness. We received responses from 735 childcare providers in Colorado. Analyses of the survey data are ongoing and will be presented in a master’s thesis that will help identify strengths and gaps and inform policy and future efforts in terms of disaster preparedness among childcare providers.

Keywords: disaster preparedness, childcare, children

The Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are developing a Homeless Disaster Planning Toolkit to improve the integration of homeless populations and their service providers in disaster preparedness, planning, and response. Individuals experiencing homelessness are often neglected in emergency planning, creating a need for improvements in disaster care and service delivery. They are likely to present a greater burden to first responders and safety net services after a disaster if their needs are not addressed.

Scheduled for release in September 2015, this toolkit provides emergency managers and service providers with guidance, solutions and resources to help them improve efforts during disasters to assist individuals experiencing homelessness. It focuses on three areas: 1) Communication and coordination; 2) Technical assistance for community-based service provider organizations; and 3) Guidance for clinical health providers on homeless disaster care. Partnering with community service providers is essential to achieving a Whole Community approach to resilience. Collaboration between local emergency managers and homeless service providers helps ensure homeless populations’ access to timely and actionable disaster information. It also ensures that homeless individuals’ disaster care needs are coordinated with the service providers who work with them every day. We outline some ways that technical assistance and training can empower community service organizations to act as front-line responders to homeless communities in disaster. Guidance for clinicians focuses on behavioral health and other needs for health care system preparedness, including individual diagnosis and health care system planning.

This presentation summarizes research on the public benefit and warning effectiveness of geo-targeted wireless emergency alerts (WEA) in two imminent threat scenarios. The two scenarios considered are tornados in Alabama and a tsunami warning in Southern California. The tornado scenario analysis is based on historical data. The data are used to predict the performance of geo-targeted WEA messaging in areas threatened by highly destructive tornados. On April 27, 2011 a string of deadly tornadoes struck Alabama. At the time tornado warnings were issued by radio, television and siren. Emergency warning messages were not issued to the public using cell phones. Since that time the WEA service has been enabled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and deployed by many cellular telephone providers in the U.S. We use data from the National Weather Service to estimate the warning effectiveness of WEA if it had been available on April 27, 2011.

Large earthquakes under the ocean floor can occur near the California coast, which could in turn can generate a tsunami. Studies have been conducted to identify the areas of the California coastline threatened by tsunami. This research is used to predict the warning effectiveness of WEA alerts in the event of a tsunami in three critical areas along the Southern California coast.

Keywords: Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), tornado warnings, tsunami warnings

A clear view of the private sector’s history, awareness, involvement, potential, plans and actions related to adapting to and mitigating the risks associated with climate change are mostly unknown or not well defined. Work is underway to more closely examine the situation and create the needed transparency, as well as the tools to address the barriers and more effectively define the private sector’s current and future role in advancing resilience-building and reducing the risks from disasters.

Goodman has been performing an in-depth examination of emerging business reactions to, and plans and preparations for climate events (fires, storms, floods, hurricanes, and drought). As part of her work, learnings and insights from companies that are amongst some of today’s top leaders in sustainability and resilience demonstrate solutions to real problems that real companies are facing in real time.

With years of construction industry expertise as the CEO of Titan America, Papadopoulos has effectively compiled a comprehensive view of the U.S. built environment and why it is failing. His research has focused on the role of insurance, government policies and private interests in creating a building system that, to this day, is underperforming. He’s developed four risk principles and promotes how the green and resilience movements can work together in order to achieve a more sustainable future.

To provide people with more specific information about tornado threats, the National Weather Service has replaced its county-wide warnings with smaller warning polygons that more clearly indicate the risk area. However, tornado warning polygons do not have a standardized definition regarding the probability that a tornado is expected to strike within the polygon, so it is unclear how warning recipients interpret them. To better understand this issue, we conducted a study in which 155 students responded to 15 hypothetical tornado warning polygons. After viewing each polygon, participants rated the likelihood of a tornado striking their location and the likelihood that they would take nine different response actions ranging from continuing normal activities to getting in a car and driving somewhere safer. The results showed participants inferred that the tornado strike probability was highest at the polygon’s centroid, lower just inside the edges of the polygon, still lower just outside the edges of the polygon, and lowest in locations beyond that. These findings indicate that participants can interpret geographical phenomena in terms of continua rather than discrete categories—regardless of the way in which those phenomena are depicted on a map. Moreover, higher subjective probabilities of being struck were associated with lower expectations of continuing normal activities and higher expectations of seeking information from social sources (but not going outside to seek environmental cues) and higher expectations of seeking shelter (but not evacuating in their cars). These results indicate that most people are likely to respond appropriately to the strike probabilities they infer from the warning polygons.

Hisnchu Science Park has been known as the Silicon Valley of Taiwan. The communities near Hisnchu Science Park are heavily shaped and impacted by high-tech computer factories in many different ways. The Park itself counted for six percent of Taiwan’s GDP in 2013. On the other hand, however, environmental and resilience issues have always been its local residents’ biggest concerns. The objective of this study is to reveal the issues and the relationships among industries, local government agencies, and local residents. This study applied a Community-wide Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment (CVAC) analysis and in-depth interviews to identify and examine community disaster impact issues. The focus group communities are the ones located downstream of the Xiao-li Riverbank areas (Longtan District, Taoyuan City). Although the high-tech factories provide employment opportunities and a tax base to the local government, the long-term environmental vulnerability impacts to the downstream communities are issues that cannot be ignored. This case study found that (1) corporation taxes from the hi-tech factories, which are located in the Xiao-li River’s upper stream areas, are Taoyuan City’s most important fiscal revenue source; however, the downstream communities have suffered from environmental threats (water contamination) and social instabilities (environmental protests) for years; (2) these socio-economically vulnerable downstream communities gradually developed a “bottom up” community resiliency model. The local school system, community groups and residents were united against the local government’s watershed management policies, which favored the industries.

Based on the current situation, the frequency for severe, natural, torrential hazards has been continuously increasing as an effect of climate change. According to the Ministry of Public Safety and Security (MPSS), for the last decade, flood damage took the largest toll at 52 percent among all types of natural hazards, followed by wind damage at 25 percent, and snow damage at 20 percent. As a non-structural measure, Korea implemented a natural hazards insurance policy. The dilemma, with regards to the application of the insurance rate, is that it is uniformly distributed on all places in one administrative district. However, in actuality, various places in each district have a different level of insurance rate, so it is obvious that each municipality has different risk factors given its geographical features. Therefore, they must have a separate insurance rate from the other places in the same district.

In this research, natural hazards based on the threat of flood, wind and snow risk were analyzed to develop a grid-based insurance rate map in Daegu, Gyeongbuk and Gangwon provinces in Korea. The insurance rate map and natural hazards have four risk levels, namely: safe, warning, dangerous and severely dangerous by water depth, wind velocity and snow load, respectively. An integrated management system was constructed for systematic and scientific management for the insurance rate map and natural hazards. The integrated management system, including reasonable insurance rate map, will be used by the policy maker, insurance company and insurance customer effectively for natural hazards management.

Communities of the U.S. Gulf Coast face economic and social volatility due to numerous factors, including an increase in hazard impacts, particularly tropical cyclones. In recent decades, these communities have also experienced dramatic growth in population and property values. This research project analyzes the vulnerability and resilience of a sample of communities in the Mississippi Gulf Coast counties to determine the effectiveness of public policy in enhancing recovery after disasters, as well as long-term resilience to hazards.

This research, funded by the National Science Foundation (CMMI-1335187), compares predicted and actual economic vulnerability and resilience in these counties by determining economic vulnerability of the study communities to tropical cyclones; identifying socio-economic-cultural, organizational, and structure/policy-related factors responsible for variations in resilience of a community through time; and analyzing the role of community participation in augmenting recovery and resilience. This research complements ongoing efforts by communities and agencies of the Mississippi Gulf Coast to increase their resilience by providing information about the influence of public policy on recovery after tropical storms. This research will: (1) identify and rank community characteristics that contribute to variations in economic vulnerability and resilience; (2) visualize the spatial distribution of vulnerability and resilience; (3) aid in determining the role of community participation in disaster mitigation policies and increased resilience; (4) develop a resilience index as a tool for future mitigation, and (5) create a Spatial Decision Support System to increase coastal awareness and community participation in disaster mitigation.

Keywords: resilience, vulnerability, socio-economic, geo-targeting, spatial analysis and modeling

Consumers, insurers and insurance regulators have difficulties in dealing with insurance for low-probability high-consequence events. Given their limited experience with catastrophes, there is a tendency for all three parties often to engage in short-term intuitive thinking rather than long-term deliberative thinking when making these insurance-related decisions.

To address these challenges, public-private partnerships can encourage long-term investment in protective measures prior to a disaster, and assist homeowners who need financial assistance in purchasing insurance. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) provides an opportunity to implement a public-private partnership that could serve as an example for managing other extreme events.

Empirical analyses using data from the NFIP suggest ways to make property owners and communities more resilient to natural disasters. By having flood insurance premiums based on risk, residents are provided with accurate signals as to the nature of the hazards they face. Homeowners will also be encouraged to engage in cost-effective mitigation measures by having their premiums reduced to reflect lower claims. Long-term loans could spread the upfront costs of these measures over time so the premium reduction is greater than the annual loan cost for many of these measures, making them financially attractive. To address equity and affordability issues, means-tested vouchers could be given to low-income individuals currently residing in hazard-prone areas.

With the increased risk of climate change (e.g., the potential increased magnitude and frequency of extreme climate and weather events), the level of disaster risk would possibly exceed the historical experiences in disaster management. This is particularly significant for Taiwan—an island that is hit frequently by hydrometeorological hazards each year. While there are usually two separate policy communities in response to these two issues (i.e., climate change and disaster), numerous important international organizations and experts have argued that the integration of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction is necessary because it can increase the efficiency of government resource and policy coherence of two originally alienated policy communities.

This paper discusses the importance of the integration of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction and to explore how these two issues are practically integrated in Taiwan in terms of several perspectives, such as institutions, scientific research and development, policy communities (policy actors and policy agenda), etc. Although it aims to provide an empirical example of the integration of these two issues, it also concludes by raising some problems that need to be overcome for a better synergy in the future.

The project team conducted research in Louisiana, with traditional ecosystem users, and Mississippi, with natural resource managers, in order to determine a method for producing localized vulnerability/sustainability maps for accelerated sea level rise for the two study sites, and determine how and whether the results of such an approach can provide more useful information for assessing localized impacts of sea level rise. The goals of the project are to develop and refine the sea level rise visualization tools for local implementation in areas experiencing subsidence and erosion, and discover the different ways stakeholder groups evaluate risk and plan mitigation strategies associated with predicted sea level rise. The data analysis involves interviewing stakeholders, coding the interviews for themes, and then converting the themes into vulnerability and sustainability factors. Each factor is weighted according to emphasis by the experts and number of experts who mention it, in order to determine which factors are of the highest priority. These priorities are then mapped with emphasis on the vulnerability and sustainability factors. The maps are then brought back to the stakeholders and used to benefit hazard mitigation and adaptation planning.

Typhoon Morakot, one of the extreme typhoon events in Taiwan, caused the most severe disasters of Taiwan. Due to the huge impacts, the Government started to develop the information platform for integrating the technologies to empower the capacity of disaster prevention and mitigation in every county. For this purpose, the government launched a large project, namely “The Executive Yuan Program on the Application of Science and Technology for Disaster Reduction” from 2011 to 2014. There were seven departments, including 348 project teams, which were involved in this project. The research topics included flood inundation, earthquakes, climate change, and so on. This project not only enhanced the research of multi-disaster research, but also provided a useful information platform for sharing the prevention technologies and preparedness experiences.

Finally, the achievements of this platform are: (1) to collect the information of disaster prevention and mitigation in different departments; (2) to provide the practical numerical models for disaster simulation; (3) to integrate the real-time monitoring data in different departments for disaster preparedness; (4) to share the experiences of disaster prevention and mitigation.

As fire seasons become more intense as a result of climate change, a century of fire suppression policies, and suburban development in wildland-urban interface areas, the once little known profession of wildland firefighting has been thrust into the public eye. With hazards to federal wildland firefighters mounting, more needs to be done to address systemic safety issues that exist within federal fire safety policies; namely, the absence of a medic position on federal wildland fire crews, as well as a lack of training to provide firefighters with the knowledge required to identify serious medical emergencies. Recent changes to safety policy have placed the responsibility of safety on firefighters themselves which requires the individual to be resilient during medical emergencies, rather than addressing systemic institutional problems that leave firefighters vulnerable in the first place. Currently, it appears that firefighter vulnerability varies geographically as a result of differences in safety policy among and within federal land management agencies. Additionally, it appears that the hazards faced by firefighters among the scale of incident types may also vary based on the size and severity of the incident. These factors will be investigated through comparisons of federal land management safety policy documents, statistical analysis of types of injuries on large and small incidents, and interviews with firefighters and policy makers. The objective of this study is to examine how current practices and policies leave firefighters unnecessarily vulnerable.

100 Resilient Cities (100RC) is an effort launched in 2013 dedicated “to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social, and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century.” Through support from the Rockefeller Foundation and managed as a sponsored project by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA), 100RC supports the adoption and incorporation of a view of resilience that includes not just the shocks and disasters from physical and environmental hazards, but also the cities’ chronic social and economic stressors. To date, 67 of the 100 cities have been announced. 100RC provides the following resources to cities:

1. Funds for two years to establish a Chief Resilience Officer in each city’s government;

2. Technical support for the development of a resilience strategy;

3. Access to service partners to help develop and implement resilience strategies for three years;

4. Ongoing membership in the global network of member cities to share practices.

The Urban Institute was engaged late in 2014 to perform the first phase of monitoring for 100RC. The Phase I monitoring is structured around four levels of analysis: 1) the overall operations’ activities and outputs; 2) the short-term outcomes in a sample of the cities themselves; 3) the overall concept for the effort and its theory of change; and 4) the long-term outcomes and goals in the member cities, including baseline measurement using contemporary urban resilience indicator frameworks. The monitoring effort is ongoing.

Voluntary property acquisitions, or buyouts, are increasingly playing a major role in the mitigation of and recovery from flood disasters. This research investigates disaster recovery through the acquisition of 1,008 properties that were flooded in the historic 2008 Midwest Flood. Two research questions drive the analysis: (1) to what extent does recovery vary by federal funding program, and (2) what is the relationship between recovery and vulnerable populations? First, homeowner recovery is defined as the amount of aid property owners received normalized by the pre-flooded accessed value of their property. The resulting variable measures relative recovery yielding an expected value of one.

A hotspot analysis of Local Moran’s I is applied to compare recovery across three cities of Iowa: Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and the City of Palo. The t-test is applied to compare the recover ratio across the two federal programs that funded these acquisitions: the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) and the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG). Finally, the relative recovery measure is aggregated to the census blockgroup level and correlated with demographic variables representing populations with high vulnerability to disasters. The results indicate that recovery rates differ by the funding federal program. On average, properties purchased with HMGP had higher recovery rates. And finally, higher vulnerability was associated with lower recovery rates for the minority, renter, and poverty populations. Future research should investigate how differences in property acquisition outcomes affect other aspects of recovery such as relocation and securing a permanent home.

Recent disasters including Hurricane Sandy and Katrina, revealed huge challenges to promptly restore communities during the recovery process. Anticipated increase in future extreme events coupled with growing population in disaster‐prone regions have created an urgent need for a better understanding of recovery process. While many studies examined the macroeconomic effects of certain measures and policies, very few, if any, have focused on modeling the housing recovery decisions of households which is believed to be significantly influenced by their social networks. The objective of this research is to explore the constituents of households’ social networks through investigating the determinants of their neighborhood boundaries. Defining neighborhoods has long been a practical struggle as they are not just geographical territories but are social constructions which are named and bounded by a diverse range of individuals. In this research an online survey was designed and conducted in the states of New York and Louisiana which were the targets of the US two costliest hurricanes Sandy and Katrina. The survey provided participants with an online graphical user interface in which participants could manually draw a polygon around the area they perceived to be their neighborhood. These neighborhoods were then analyzed to check how they compare to fixed units defined by administrative agencies such as the Census Bureau. Also the survey collected information on parameters influencing participants’ perceived neighborhood.

The State of California has 38 million inhabitants, and covers 164,000 square miles. A combination of high population density and high seismicity has created a seismic vulnerability for the State with uncertainty as to how quickly it can respond to and recover from a major earthquake. Acknowledgement of this problem resulted in engineering faculty at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, assisting the California Office of Emergency Services in the development of a standardized earthquake vulnerability assessment methodology for state-owned buildings identified as critically necessary for response and recovery efforts.

The methodology assumes that existing state-owned infrastructure can be quickly screened for criticality and potential weaknesses resulting in an ability to prioritize vulnerability assessments for key buildings. Test cases of the methodology with California agencies and departments pointed to implementation challenges due to a lack of infrastructure knowledge. Various solutions were proposed; using HAZUS as a prioritization tool, site visits by experienced engineers to gather needed data and the development of a modified version of FEMA 154: Rapid Visual Screening of Buildings for Potential Seismic Hazards. Work has been undertaken on the use of HAZUS and a modified version of FEMA 154 as rapid evaluation tools.

The Emergency Operations Center Academy, or EOC Academy, is a re-occurring training session offered at Adams County designed to train people on how to serve as support staff in the EOC. We learned we needed to adjust our trainings by considering what our needs were as emergency managers and how we can achieve this while providing an interesting training. We decided to break the Academy into two parts: EOC Basic Academy and EOC Advanced Academy. The EOC Basic Academy focuses on introducing trainees on what emergency management is and how the EOC command staff (Planning and Logistics) operates. The goal here is to provide trainees basic EOC skills along with an average ability to serve in Planning or Logistics as what we call “EOC Support Staff.” We found that this approach allowed more creativity and furthered the retention of our trainees. Following completion of the Basic Academy, trainees are invited to attend the EOC Advanced Academy. The EOC Advanced Academy takes them off the computers, away from the FEMA forms, and focuses them strictly on human behavior during stressful times. The entirety of the EOC Advanced Academy is focused on creating Section Chiefs who understand what behaviors are necessary to effectively build, construct, and share the story of an EOC operational period.

Both academies are six months long and are structured to have each session provide one hour of an engaging and energetic lessons followed by an activity or exercise which allows the attendee to practice the information learned.

After experiencing extensive flood damages, communities in Queensland are recovering in parallel with reconstruction and risk mitigation projects. Mitigation projects are designed to improve safety for vulnerable populations, but they also significantly impact people’s lives and thus affect the collective recovery process. Therefore, it is critical to investigate recovery processes and implementation of risk reduction efforts to better understand how societal factors influence communities’ abilities to adapt to extreme events. In St George and Grantham, both in the recovery phase from recent flood events, a longitudinal approach was adopted to capture long-term impacts and changes. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a wide range of research participants in 2013 and 2014. A questionnaire survey was also conducted in 2014 to support the interview data sets.

Interview data is being investigated using qualitative data analysis software. Preliminary results indicate three interconnected factors affecting disaster recovery and risk reduction: time, finance and community interaction. This presentation will discuss these factors and their relevance to recovery and risk reduction efforts. The presentation will also introduce preliminary findings from interviews conducted in 2013 and 2015 in the North Tohoku and Fukushima regions, Japan, impacted by the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident. These four study areas are being investigated for a PhD research project that examines disaster recovery and risk reduction at a community level.

I am involved in a number of activities that are developing resilience standards and guidelines. These include the NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems, the NSF funded EERI Seismic Observatory for Community Resilience—A Program to Learn from Earthquakes project, and the EERI Nepal Earthquake Reconnaissance Team. I am also a member of the Executive Committee for the ASCE Infrastructure Resilience Division and co-chair of the Risk and Resilience Measurements Committee with a focus on setting performance objectives for the built environment. As a consulting engineer, I am currently assisting Kent Yu on his project for the Beaverton Unified School District in Oregon that is considering adding emergency shelter requirements to new schools under design. I am also working with Oregon State University on determining the siting and design criteria for a new research facility to be built in a Tsunami inundation zone on the Oregon Coast.

The concept of social capital is multidimensional, consisting of such elements as attachment to place, social cohesion and support, and social network density. As of 2008, there was little research examining the contribution of social capital to disaster resilience. This National Science Foundation-funded study examines the social impacts of the failure of a coal fly ash retention pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee in December 2008. This technological disaster released more than 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic coal ash across almost 300 acres.

The research design for the study employs a mixed-method approach with structured face-to-face interviews and self-administered household surveys using an ex post facto research design in the impact (Roane) and control (Anderson) counties. These post-event data will be compared with pre-disaster data from the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. In addition to making pre- and post-event comparisons, the study will also follow both impact and control communities over time.

Findings from this project will contribute to scholarly understanding of the effects of disasters on measures of social capital. The project will also add to the literature on the consequences of technological disasters, with a particular emphasis on the effects of post-disaster litigation. The study has potential for transforming how researchers conceptualize and measure the social capital dimensions of disaster resilience -- a fundamental issue in the field -- and also for demonstrating how social indicators collected for other purposes can be productively used by disaster researchers.

The purpose of the SAFRR HayWired Scenario Project is to foster the use of science in decision-making associated with earthquake events in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California. The Hazards Center team is conducting the evaluation of this extensive effort, which engages multiple partners at local, regional, and national levels. The overarching purpose of the evaluation activities is to provide feedback and information to the USGS and its key stakeholders regarding the development, implementation, and immediate impacts (outcomes) of the HayWired Scenario.

Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques, the evaluation team will work with SAFRR personnel to assess the following thematic areas associated with the HayWired Scenario’s development and implementation: (1) enhanced awareness and behavior change related to mitigation and preparedness among stakeholder organizations; (2) interagency coordination and collective action through network formation; (3) the effectiveness of project’s activities/strategies in engaging key local and regional stakeholders; and (4) the effectiveness of project’s activities/strategies in engaging new collaborators. In determining the effectiveness of the project’s activities, the evaluation team will also examine challenges that arise during the development and implementation of the scenario and how they are addressed. Systematically examining these aspects of primary stakeholder participation will provide an understanding of the extent to which the project’s efforts to foster the use of science in decision making, including building networks among key decision-makers, are effective.

On April 20, 2010 the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Northern Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and injuring 17 others. The rig eventually sank, leaving a breached wellhead that released an estimated 185 to 205 million gallons of crude oil in the months before it was capped and permanently sealed. Under direction from the Federal government, BP set aside $20 billion to pay damage claims. However, the claims process became a bureaucratic and legal quagmire, as well as a source of contention and stress in coastal communities. This National Science Foundation-funded project examines how settlement and litigation processes in the aftermath of this technological disaster are influencing social and psychological recovery in the State of Alabama’s coastal communities.

More than 21 years of research on the long-term social impacts of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill (EVOS) revealed that much of the chronic, EVOS-related stress, anxiety, and social disruption were a byproduct of prolonged litigation which lasted almost two decades. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence regarding whether a more immediate resolution of disaster-related litigation helps to reduce the negative social impacts of protracted legal processes. Findings from this study will contribute substantially to the limited body of knowledge in this arena by advancing understanding of ways in which post-disaster processes such as litigation and the timely settlement of damage claims can facilitate or hinder community recovery.

We use the application of seasonal climate forecasts by emergency managers in rural areas to examine how diffuse networks can help overcome the obstacles to the use of complex scientific information. Seasonal climate forecasts in this context refer to a forecast with a multiple-month lead time for a particular region that predicts the likelihood of precipitation or temperature that deviates from normal. Emergency managers in our study were more likely to use climate information if it was tied to a time and place specific forecast, and to an action or set of actions they could take. The emergency managers who accessed and interpreted the information were part of robust professional networks that included scientific professionals, primarily at the National Weather Service, as well as end users of the information who could implement steps to prepare for floods.

In 2014, Saunders and her team undertook a four stage project to assess the quality of land use planning provisions for natural hazards in New Zealand. This involved assessing 99 operative regional policy statements, district plans and emergency management plans. This desk top study was complemented with a survey of the capability and capacity of councils for natural hazard planning. The findings of the three studies can be used to answer one key question: what is the state of planning for natural hazards in New Zealand?

The answer is somewhat complicated—as to be expected from analyzing 99 plans. Notwithstanding, the state of planning for natural hazards in New Zealand appears to be improving between first and second generation plans. As natural hazards knowledge and awareness increases, information sharing improves, planning for risk continues to grow momentum, and new frameworks are developed and implemented, this trend should continue. However, there is still significant room for improving hazard provisions for some councils.

The other research highlight from this research is the implementation of a risk-based toolkit for reducing risks to land use from natural hazards (http://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/RBP/Risk-based-planning). Since its inception in 2013, councils around New Zealand are beginning to implement the approach, where the focus is on consequences, rather than likelihood. The result is a measurable and transparent framework for decision makers to determine levels of natural hazard risk for land use planning

Based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s definition of adaptive capacity, collective adaptive capacities refer to the resources, characteristics, and functions of a community to prevent, prepare for, and respond to climate change and disaster. Enhancing collective adaptive capacity is crucial to resilient communities. Our research aims to enhance this capacity with a focus on the formal and informal networks of coordination between governmental and nonprofit organizations in emergency management and disaster recovery. As the provision of social services increasingly shifts to the nonprofit sector— churches, social service agencies, national nonprofit organizations —disaster mitigation and recovery rests here. Therefore, research and policy should: 1) Enhance the communication and relationship between emergency management and the nonprofit sector; 2) Create effective channels to provide resources to the nonprofit sector to respond to disaster; and 3) Increase awareness of the crucial need to support human resources and health during disaster response and recovery.

This recently completed project of the American Planning Association (APA), supported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was a four-year effort to rewrite a landmark 1998 publication, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction. The new Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Report was released in January 2015 and deals with, among others, the following central topics:

-- The role of resilience in local governance and response to disasters

-- The types of post-disaster recovery planning (pre- and post-) and how to differentiate the objectives in each case

-- The evolving and current federal statutory and programmatic framework for managing post-disaster recovery

-- Major chapters on recovery planning dealing with: goals and policies; planning process; implementation and financing

-- Model pre-event recovery ordinance

In addition to the new PAS Report (No. 576), the APA project included a number of web-based resources as well as presentations at the APA National Planning Conference and some state chapter conferences. The online resources developed under this project included:

-- Downloadable, annotated version of the model recovery ordinance;

-- Recovery News, a blog especially devoted to issues of post-disaster recovery;

-- An extensive drop-down menu of federal and national nonprofit disaster assistance programs with program details and links;

-- Online case studies of recovery scenarios;

-- A series of 12 downloadable briefing papers on specific subtopics concerning disaster recovery;

-- An extensive annotated bibliography of resources and publications related to recovery;

-- Background materials on the project itself.

For more information on the project, go to www.planning.org/research/postdisaster.

The subdivision of land in or near floodplains involves the potential creation of tomorrow's flood risks. In an era of increasing attention to climate change, those risks may be greater than they have been in the past.

APA has a long history of addressing these issues, dating back at least to its 1997 publication of Subdivision Design in Flood Hazard Areas.

Now, in partnership with the Association of State Floodplain Managers, and with funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, we are revisiting the topic to provide updated guidance on the subject for local planners, consultants, and others involved in the subdivision design and site plan review process. The need is clear for much more technical guidance related to all aspects of subdivisions, from planning to design, to standards, to infrastructure maintenance. The new PAS Report will benefit from a larger effort at partnership between APA and ASFPM on a number of fronts. Both organizations have been leaders in the NOAA Digital Coast Partnership. APA and ASFPM are partnering also on a new project called the Planning Information Exchange, funded under the same agreement with FEMA, to provide educational webinars on hazard mitigation planning. And we are exploring other areas as well that we consider grounds for potential fruitful collaboration. Planners and floodplain managers have many common goals, and our two organizations even have some overlapping membership. Both bring valuable expertise to this project.

When a major disaster causing death and extensive property loss occurs, victims, society and government ask: should people rebuild where they lived before? In most instances, the answer is yes, even though the costs may be high and the disaster risk may not be significantly reduced. The recent case of Super Storm Sandy in parts of the states of New York and New Jersey is an example of the “remain in place” at any economic or level of risk decision. There are, however, times when the answer is “no, let’s move to another place.” The voluntary residential red zone (RRZ) buy-out program of about 7,300 properties in the Canterbury region, on New Zealand’s South Island is one such instance where moving to a safer place is the government’s preferred choice. In this program residential properties are acquired by the national government, the buildings removed, people move to other locations, and the risk of future losses vastly decrease.

The questions addressed are: what information and conditions led to the national government making the decision; how were procedural decisions made, what happened to the people who sold their properties to the government; how do the “voluntary movers” feel about their situation now; and what will happen to the land inside the RRZ? Four data sources are utilized: published government documents, survey data of households conducted by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), academic studies of victims, technical reports of major geo-technical studies; and relocation surveys conducted by the City of Christchurch.

Climate change threatens our global community with rising seas, higher temperatures, and more severe weather events. In the present research, I take two theoretically interesting samples in Houston, Texas, USA and Copenhagen, Denmark, and test to see if previous assumptions from national-level and primarily U.S.-based quantitative research hold. Using the 2014 Houston Area Survey and the 2014 Copenhagen Area Survey, the findings from this research suggest that the specific city context is important. Not only is the level of climate change denial different—much more likely in Houston than Copenhagen—but the predictors of such beliefs vary as well. In Houston, whites, men, conservatives and independents (relative to Democrats), suburbanites, and the very religious all have significantly higher rates of climate change denial. In Copenhagen, though, only the very religious and members of right-wing parties, in addition to men, have higher rates of climate change denial. I argue that the rareness of very religious or right-wing identities in Copenhagen, coupled with the ideological coherence stemming from those viewpoints, provides for the heavy work necessary to part from mainstream Copenhagen. In Houston, though, that ideological work is not necessary because nearly a third of respondents doubt global warming, opening the way for attitudinal adoption by a number of different populations. The implications are that cities matter, and that local public opinion should be studied to better understand climate change resilience.

This research seeks to better understand the role of the state in disaster recovery, including the key roles assumed by executive and mid-level managers, namely governors, their cabinet, and state agency officials tasked with disaster recovery duties. A comparative case study approach is used in which the states of North Carolina and Mississippi are analyzed following Hurricanes Floyd and Katrina, both of which represent the worst disasters in each state’s respective history. Analysis involves the review of documents, direct and participant observation, and personal interviews conducted with governors and state agency officials involved in disaster recovery. The filmed interviews, which range from one to two and a half hours in length, will provide the basis for a set of video-based training modules for use by the Federal Emergency Management Agency; states; professional organizations (e.g., the American Planning Association’s newly formed Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, National Emergency Management Association, National Governors Association, International Association of Emergency Management, Naval Post-Graduate School); emergency management degree programs and curricula; and business schools (e.g., crisis leadership/gubernatorial leadership).

This research, which is derived from the text Adapting to Climate Change: Lessons from Natural Hazards Planning (Glavovic and Smith 2014), identifies lessons from natural hazard experiences to help communities plan for and adapt to climate change. Case studies are used to examine diverse experiences, from severe storms to sea-level related hazards, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, floods, earthquakes and tsunami, in North America, Europe, Australasia, Asia, Africa and Small Island Developing States. The 264 lessons (findings) are grouped according to four imperatives: (i) Develop collaborative governance networks; (ii) build adaptive capabilities; (iii) invest in pre-event planning; and (iv) the moral imperative to undertake adaptive actions that advance resilience and sustainability. The findings are intended to provide climate change policy-makers, scholars, students and practitioners with a rigorous understanding of lessons from natural hazards planning scholarship and experience that can help to overcome barriers and unlock opportunities for building communities that are sustainable and resilient to climate change.

Although agencies like the US Economic Development Administration (EDA) have actively encouraged and funded local and regional economic development organizations to integrate the concepts of resilience into their projects and plans, these organizations have often been reticent to shift their focus away from “traditional” economic development activities. However, following the 2013 floods in Colorado that affected 17 counties and resulted in over a billion dollars in damage, the State made economic resiliency a key recovery issue. Consequently EDA conducted a study to analyze and evaluate local economic development plans for resiliency.

This study describes the economic resiliency measurement tool developed by EDA, the results of the pilot analysis, and the short-term impact on economic resilience planning. Using leading economic recovery and resiliency research and case studies, a metric with 52 unique components was developed and used to review 25 economic development plans from the hardest hit region of the state. Overall, EDA found that the majority of plans addressed very few of resilience factors. Qualitative interviews confirmed these results. However, the interviews and subsequent workshops allowed an opportunity to introduce the concepts to local governments and engage them in improving economic development planning. Given the tendency of economic development organizations to avoid the topic of resilience, the results of the tool were less significant than the methodology of working with local and regional leaders to integrate resilience in economic development. This initial process is now supporting broader initiatives within the US Department of Commerce.

Economic recovery programs after disasters typically use public funds to establish grant and loan programs and other supports. Consequently, these programs require rigid frameworks of rules and documentation to reduce fraud and ensure that only affected businesses receive payments. A common problem with recovery programs, however, is that niche industries and disadvantaged populations do not or cannot conform to these frameworks, thus creating equity and efficiency failures in the delivery of resources. This research analyzes how planners and other recovery professionals can challenge the narrow structure of economic recovery programs by converting local knowledge into better program design. Specifically, this study uses Julie Stewart’s concept of “embedded brokers” in international aid provision to describe the story of Sandy Nguyen and her emergence as an embedded broker in the Vietnamese-American commercial fishing community of Southeast Louisiana. In both the development of the Business Retention Grant and Loan (BRGL) program following Katrina, and the subsistence use provisions of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF) after the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill, recovery professionals utilized Ms. Nguyen’s knowledge to design and test alternate program frameworks while still conforming to the basic fraud prevention needs of program officials. In telling this story, however, the paper challenges the diminishing set of returns to program efficacy with increased fraud prevention. The more we limit fraud, the more we limit the breadth of program access in affected communities, which suggests that incremental amounts of fraud may be acceptable in order to increase program access by those in need.

The University of Kentucky’s Risk and Disaster Communication Center, in the College of Communication and Information, was launched to bring together researchers across disciplines to provide broader, more systemic and interdisciplinary approaches for understanding how to communicate about risk, disasters, and crises. Initiatives include advanced education in risk sciences, extensive research programs in a variety of risk areas and contexts, organizational training and consulting, and community engagement and outreach. Center faculty engage in theoretically informed research to identify practical applications for risk communicators across all phases of crises and disasters. Utilizing state-of-the-art technology our research extends across multiple channels and modes of communication, providing insights on effective messaging for preparedness, response, and recovery. Our research extends into the classroom through the Graduate Certificate in Risk Sciences and into the community through consulting and outreach.

Current research projects include: Social media message modeling to identify characteristics that increase the likelihood of message retransmission under conditions of imminent threat.
Public perceptions in response to risk events via social media.
Message testing to determine which message elements increase the likelihood that individuals will take protective actions for environmental and health risks, across a variety of channels.
 Participatory community-based research to develop messages most relevant to audiences.
 Community audits to determine trusted and reliable communication channels for disaster warning and recovery information.

Weather and climate extremes might propel adaptation both to a stable climate and its characteristic extremes, as well as to underlying changes, if they reveal vulnerabilities, cause damage, and make slow change more noticeable. In theory, extremes act as focusing events that overcome barriers to adaptation and accelerate policy responses. This pace-making might be attenuated by uncertainty in interpreting trends, and extremes might also miscue decision makers, perhaps pointing in the wrong direction or evoking over-adaptation. Cases from a data-base of the most costly weather and climate extremes in the United States over the past three decades are employed to develop a propositional typology of such pace-making effects. Some adaptations in response to extremes result in reduced vulnerability, while other cases yield little effective adaptation or hint at mal-adaptation. Even the most-extreme events do not necessarily yield significant adaptation, despite calls for change and explicit attribution to climate change.

Current Projects that I am involved with include: (1) NZ Natural Hazards Research Platform projects dealing with tracking the recovery of businesses following the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010-2011; (2) A project to develop resilience indicators and indices as part of a New Zealand National Science Challenge called Resilience to Nature’s Challenges; (3) Involvement with the Christchurch 100 Resilience Cities project (funded by Rockefeller Foundation); (4) A project assessing business behaviors in the face of infrastructure disruption in support of a wider project entitled Economics of Resilient Infrastructure. There is in addition a wide range of other projects being run by Resilient Organisations (see website at www.resorgs.org.nz) for which I have oversight.

This study seeks to empirically measure disaster preparedness levels among Native American communities in the United States. While past studies have sought to measure preparedness at the individual, household, and organizational levels, few have focused explicitly on the community level and none have looked specifically at Native American populations. In addition to measuring preparedness levels, the study will also identify the major natural and technological hazards faced by Native American communities; explore and describe the structure of emergency management functions in those communities; and assess the challenges they face in their efforts to implement various disaster-related initiatives, such as the National Incident Management System and the National Preparedness Goal.

The study employs a triangulated, mixed-method approach that integrates survey research, focus group interviews, and geo-spatial analysis. The level of analysis in the research is the community, which is a significant departure from past studies, which have focused largely on individuals, households, and organizations. In addition to the intellectual merits of the research in terms of refining empirical measures of preparedness at the community level, identifying factors that influence community preparedness levels, and focusing on an understudied population, the findings of the research are also expected to have important applied implications for emergency management practitioners and other public officials responsible for preparing their communities for future disasters and thereby enhancing societal resilience to a wide range of threats.

Research indicates that many people don't engage in disaster preparedness, even when they possess sufficient resources, receive preparedness training, and/or have a history of disaster exposure. In light of this, and the increasing financial commitment of donor nations to disaster risk reduction worldwide, examination of factors potentially influencing engagement in disaster preparedness is crucial. Our recent research indicates that factors such as specific mental health symptoms, social capital, and cultural and religious beliefs appear to influence engagement in preparedness for internally displaced Haitians, landless communities living in flood-prone areas in Nepal, and survivors of Colorado floods.

Building on this research, and in collaboration with local organizations in Haiti* and Nepal, we developed a mental health integrated culturally-adapted disaster preparedness intervention. We received funding to implement and evaluate this intervention using a randomized controlled trial in Haiti and Nepal (2014-2016). To date, we have completed data collection for all three time points in Haiti. Preliminary analysis of Time 1 and 2 in Haiti indicates that the intervention has resulted in a reduction in mental health symptoms and an increase in social cohesion and disaster preparedness.

In light of the recent 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nepal end April, we are in the process of expanding this work to earthquake survivors in Kathmandu Valley.

*note: in Haiti we work with a local NGO, Soulaje Lespri Moun. John Roger Noel is the SLM program manager for this project in Haiti. He will be presenting with us this year at the Hazards Workshop.