Research and Practice Highlights

School children across earthquake-prone regions in the United States are taught to drop, cover, and hold on in the event of shaking. Despite practicing these recommendations in school drills, little is known about whether this guidance is followed by children and adults during earthquakes. To address this gap in knowledge, our research team studied the protective actions taken by children and adults during the 2018 Anchorage, Alaska, earthquake and the 2019 Ridgecrest, California, earthquake sequence. We conducted in-depth interviews with K-12 school administrators, teachers, and students, as well with parents, emergency managers, building officials, and engineers (N = 118) in earthquake-affected communities in January and February of 2020. We found that while the most common action taken by children was to drop, cover, and hold on, the behaviors were more varied among adults. Adults often did not follow current recommended guidance and engaged in such protective actions as trying to protect others, getting in doorways, freezing in place, and rapidly exiting buildings. Our findings suggest that there is a generational gap that exists between adults and children that could potentially compromise the safety of young people and their adult caretakers. We recommend that earthquake training and drills in schools target both child and adult populations. For more information on this research please see our published article in the Australasian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies.

ShakeAlert—the U.S. Geological Survey operated earthquake early warning (EEW) system—can issue warnings of significant earthquakes before shaking arrives, allowing recipients to engage in protective actions. As part of a larger effort to expand the use of EEW by individuals and institutions, our study sought to inform how to best integrate ShakeAlert into K-12 schools.

Between March 30 and June 15, 2022, our research team conducted an online survey of superintendents (N=225) in Alaska, California, Oregon, and Washington. Our findings demonstrated that only 38% of respondents had previously heard of ShakeAlert, and among those who had, nearly half had not yet considered incorporating it into their district. When asked about potential benefits of EEW, most superintendents agreed that a 10-second warning could allow students, teachers, and staff to drop, cover and hold on and mentally prepare them for shaking. In terms of barriers, they ranked the financial cost of the system and the potential to divert funds away from building maintenance or mitigation as the biggest concerns. Most respondents also thought it was the responsibility of the state government to pay for installation and maintenance.

Together, these findings suggest that superintendents believe in the benefits of ShakeAlert, but that obstacles remain to implementing the system. Given the low awareness, we suggest that emergency management agencies undertake a targeted communication campaign focusing on school district leadership. Because funding remains a concern, we also recommend educational outreach about more cost-effective options for receiving alerts, such as via mobile devices.

The conception, development, and growth of the Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN) were a direct result of the lessons learned by the land-grant system responding to the catastrophic Mississippi and Missouri River Floods of 1993.

The emergency management community discovered that the land-grant system could be a tremendous asset. The field staff are part of local communities, therefore, they are present locally before, during, and after any incident.  Citizens looked to extensions for resources and expertise related to disaster recovery, mitigation, and preparedness

September 11, 2001, raised the profile of disaster management and, of specific relevance to EDEN and U.S. Department of Agriculture, the importance of protecting the nation’s food supply. As a veterinarian my involvement is primarily with animals and agriculture.

Thirty years later EDEN's membership includes 38 land grant universities and four Sea Grant consortiums. Wanna know more? Let's talk. 

What would be helpful to your in terms of geospatial software that could improve the resilience of healthcare systems to disasters? We’re actively looking for input from practitioners and researchers in disaster planning and preparedness on the capabilities and data they want in such software.

We’re developing FloodWatch—a web-based platform that integrates national data on healthcare facilities, epidemiological data on social vulnerability, scientifically accredited information on local flood risk, and real-time information on flood events to support research that improves response to future disasters. We envision FloodWatch as being used in various ways, from estimating the availability of specific healthcare services in 100-year flood regions to assessing flood risks of  healthcare facilities to estimating local need for healthcare resources using hypothetical disaster scenarios.

We’re primarily a team of engineers and we want to make something that the larger disaster community will find useful. Please tell us what you want! This input could range from 15 minutes of your time to an ongoing collaboration. We'd like to connect with potential users and stakeholders to guide the development of FloodWatch and test prototype versions.

For more details, please download this information sheet. To get involved, you can connect with Lindsay Allen at the Workshop or contact Principal Investigator Jerry Bieszczad at jyb@creare.com. Creare is an engineering research and development company located in Hanover, NH, developing FloodWatch in part under a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Small Business Innovation Research project (CDC-SIBR #R43EH001371).

Learning From Earthquakes (LFE), the flagship program of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), works to accelerate and increase learning from earthquake-induced disasters that affect the natural, built, social, and political environments worldwide. Through LFE, EERI conducts multi-disciplinary field reconnaissance, provides coordination for the reconnaissance community, and disseminates research findings. 

In response to the devastating February 6, 2023, Kahramanmaraş earthquake sequence affecting southern Turkey and northern Syria, LFE chaired coordination calls between international reconnaissance organizations and an Ankara-based clearinghouse to facilitate collaboration with local researchers. A joint advance reconnaissance team from LFE and the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association traveled to Turkey a week after the earthquakes to collect perishable data and identify areas for further research. Three additional LFE teams followed in March, focusing on impacts to buildings, hospitals, and lifelines. Preliminary findings from these teams are available in a recent GEER-EERI joint report and LFE webinar series. Additional resources can be found at LFE’s virtual earthquake clearinghouse. EERI’s journal, Earthquake Spectra, has also issued a call for papers for a special collection on the February 2023 earthquakes.

In the wake of these earthquakes, EERI has also worked to inform the public and policymakers about earthquake risk and measures to increase resilience in their communities. EERI members provided expert insight in response to press inquiries, and EERI’s Public Policy and Advocacy Committee worked with the Structural Engineers Association of California to issue a joint policy agenda on Legislative Actions Needed to Reduce California’s Earthquake Risk. 

In my role as a graduate research assistant at the Natural Hazards Center, I serve as the data manager for the Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) network, the mission of which is to identify social science researchers and help them build connections—to one another, to interdisciplinary teams, and to communities affected by disaster and disaster risk. In spring 2023, I was named a National Science Foundation (NSF) Non-Academic Research Internships for Graduate Students (INTERN) awardee as part of the NSF-supported CONVERGE grant. This supplemental funding allowed me to simultaneously work at the Natural Hazards Center and at Esri, a leader in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. I spent my time learning the principles of GIS and the capabilities of the ArcGIS Online software. 

This summer, I am working with Esri's Jeff Baranyi to enhance and amplify the novel SSEER dataset and interactive web map. Specifically, I have nearly completed work on an SSEER StoryMap—which combines the power of interactive maps with text and multimedia content—to showcase this network of more than 1,500 social scientists and highlight their key findings. I have also been learning more about the capabilities of Esri apps such as ArcGIS Hub and Dashboards, which will allow users to interact with the SSEER data. Please keep an eye on the SSEER page to view these exciting new applications!

The Isthmus of Chignecto, a critical nexus of Canadian transportation and economic infrastructure, faces unprecedented challenges driven by climate change. This key land bridge supports major transportation corridors used for commercial, tourism, and personal travel, providing road and rail connections stimulating the regional and national economy.

Predictive modeling forecasts extreme weather by 2100, expected to cause substantial erosion to the Acadian dike system. Such deterioration, coupled with a 12-meter rise in sea levels, threatens to sever Nova Scotia from Canada, disrupting economic stability and impeding access to the world's largest ice-free port in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Atlantic Canada's most extensive population base. The potential for significant losses and devastating impacts on livelihoods necessitates a swift, decisive response.

This research underscores the urgency of adopting proactive, human-centric disaster mitigation and prevention strategies in the Isthmus of Chignecto. Substantial government and commercial investment in resilient infrastructure safeguarding these critical transportation corridors are required to ensure a sustainable future for the region. Additionally, this study underscores the necessity of comprehensive disaster management planning in an era of escalating climate change risks.

Other areas of research interest include the use of drones, emerging technologies, and their legal frameworks for disaster management; the pandemic model and abuse of civil liberties as a cautionary tool for disaster response; mobility and disabilities in disasters; veteran supports in disasters; homeless populations as an emerging disaster; and the rural versus urban divide of disaster response.

The Diversifying HayWired Communication Project aims to be a prototype for information products and earthquake risk communication strategies that are responsive to the needs of marginalized communities. It builds on insights generated by the U.S. Geological Survey’s HayWired earthquake scenario on the impacts of a hypothetical, yet scientifically plausible, magnitude-7.0 earthquake on the Hayward Fault. Phase II of this collaboration features three targeted studies developed by fellows of the Bill Anderson Fund that examine issues related to food security, financial resilience, and inclusive game design.  

The food security theme assesses the disaster preparedness capabilities of grassroots organizations focused on food security and hunger alleviation in communities surrounding the East Bay. This project finds that grassroots organizations and food assistance initiatives model the inclusive and culturally relevant approaches that can positively impact seismic resilience and risk communication. It provides recommendations for increasing connections and knowledge exchange with the disaster planning community.

The financial resilience theme involves a conceptual study that proposes the creation of a formal earthquake-focused coalition called the HayWired HandShake Network. Anchored by local chambers of commerce in the San Francisco Bay Area, the network would constitute a strategic partnership between the HayWired Coalition Partners, banks that are chamber members, and minority-owned businesses.

The serious games theme examines the state of knowledge about educational games and identifies considerations for designing games that communicate adisaster risk. It incorporates perspectives on inclusive game design to inform strategies for reaching diverse communities with serious games that support disaster resilience.

Geographically, Bangladesh is a delta. Every year during the monsoon a large volume of water passes through the country from the Ganges-Meghna-Brahmaputra Basins. This water inundates floodplains and induces catastrophic floods for the communities. To improve flood risk management strategies, along with other climatic hazards, the government has developed Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100. The scholars who worked to develop this plan recommended introducing a special flood volunteer program in the flood zone to make communities resilient. The plan also recommended training and education programs for those volunteers.

This study introduced the randomized controlled trial method for the first time in disaster studies in Bangladesh. The study assessed the current beliefs and actions of the communities related to flood volunteerism. Most of the communities believe that flood volunteers can improve the flood risk management system and make them resilient.

The study selected two small groups to complete the trial. Each group included 15 randomly selected members. One group was identified as the treatment group, which received training, and the other one was the control, which was not trained. Before the training, a baseline was developed for both groups to understand the change after training. After the training, the assessment showed that the treatment group was more effective and efficient at managing flood impacts than the control group. Trained volunteers successfully implemented all the flood risk management strategies. As the volunteers were locals, the training directly improved the community-based flood risk management capacity.

My current research focus is on developing community-inclusive approaches to acute hazard resilience from perspectives of equity-seeking and marginalized groups on the Oregon central coast. I spent the past year working with coastal two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other diversely identifying  (2SLGBTQ+) communities to co-develop research methodologies and practices to grow everyday resilience. This involved building and supporting more robust social and cross-sectoral networks, identifying community assets and vulnerabilities, and identifying and addressing barriers to meeting everyday community needs. With input from a community advisory committee comprised of local members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, I then developed a community survey to gauge existing knowledge of coastal hazards, assess community needs and capacities relative to a future earthquake and tsunami, and develop an understanding of how the community's goals and desires might relate to these processes. Currently, I am building on findings from the survey to develop a similar research methodology with Latinx and tribal and Indigenous communities. The goals are to identify overlapping co-adaptations and co-benefits that contribute both to community adaptive capacity to an acute coastal hazard, and to everyday risks and vulnerabilities associated with life as a member of a marginalized group on the Oregon coast.

Children, teens, and older adults are often vulnerable during disasters and targeted for interventions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these populations experienced varying types of vulnerability. For older adults (ages 65 or older), vulnerability is largely attributed to greater health risks associated with virus exposure. Children and teens (ages 5-18) are less likely to suffer severe complications from COVID-19 infections, but many have experienced academic setbacks because of the disruption to their learning. Additionally, all three age groups have experienced mental and emotional health concerns associated with isolation and economic and social instability. Indeed, age vulnerability is central in the pandemic, and yet, the voices of the young and old are rarely heard.

This ongoing research project explores the lived pandemic experiences of children, teens, and older adults in several sites in the United States and Canada, focusing specifically on their vulnerabilities, mobilities, and capacities. We used multiple methods—including interviews, online surveys, drawings, mapping activities, focus groups, daily journals, and podcasts—to learn from older adults, children, teens, parents of young children, and key informants in the community. Results will contribute to better disaster preparedness, responses, and policies and support systems that address the specific challenges of these diverse groups. A broader understanding of the experiences of children, teens, and older adults is necessary to keep potentially vulnerable populations safe and resilient as the pandemic continues and to prepare us for future disasters. More information is available in this Natural Hazards Center Quick Response Research Report.

Implementation of the Operating Model Review findings program is a key strategic priority for the emergency management sector in Victoria, Australia. Specifically, to build a sustainable emergency management workforce that represents the people it serves. Successful implementation will also acquit findings from various inquiries relating to Victoria’s emergency management sector operating model.

This program will successfully support the delivery of a more secure, reliable, and efficient model for the core of the emergency management workforce. This will be achieved through robust sector co-design, the implementation of new workforce models, and the securing of future funding to ensure sustainability of initiatives.

This program of work has the following key objectives:

* Establish a program of work that targets the key barriers to the emergency management sector volunteering (in progress).

* Design and implement a more sustainable and reliable resourcing model for state-wide incident management team capacity and capability (in progress).

* Conduct a strategic review of (a) the model of control, coordination, and escalation, (b) readiness arrangements, and (c) control center facilities (not yet commenced).

* Design and implement the concept of an emergency management corps to recruit the Victorian Public Service into emergency management operations during a major emergency (in progress).

- Design a program of work to unlock the potential of spontaneous volunteers and partnerships with the not-for-profit and private sectors (in progress).

The agricultural drought index is evaluated using soil moisture and crop dryness, while the hydrological drought index is evaluated based on water shortage by comparing demands with water resources available for supply, such as rivers and groundwater, reservoirs and dams. However, these methods were found to over- or under-estimate the relatively low sensitivity of agricultural water as they assess the shortage of water for life and industry. Therefore, we improved the Agricultural Water Demand and Supply Drought Index (AWDSDI), which evaluates agricultural drought by analyzing water supply systems such as agricultural reservoirs, pumping stations and drainage, groundwater systems, and demands for agricultural water. In order to improve the developed drought index, the improved AWDSDI was applied to 32 Eps and Myuns in three cities, including Jincheongun, Changnyeonggun, and Jangseonggun in Korea in the period June-August 2017, when drought damage was significant. It was found that the improved AWDSDI reproduced the daily agricultural drought well in small administrative districts such as Eps and Myuns. In addition, in order to verify the improved drought index, the evaluation results of the improved AWDSDI, the previously developed agricultural drought index and the hydrological drought index were compared together. The comparison found that the improved AWDSDI reproduced the drought period and drought depth in 32 Eps and Myuns in three cities better than previously developed drought indices.

Flooding is a frequent disaster that impacts every country and contributes to significant societal and financial losses. Several hydrodynamic models are available to forecast flooding events. With advancements in sensor technologies, Earth observation data are also used to identify flood events and their impacts. However, the flood models are local or regional in their focus or proprietary (e.g., FATHOM) and their accuracy is dependent on datasets, statistical approaches, and representation of the topographic conditions. By contrast, earth observation data-derived flood products are available globally, but at varying spatial, temporal, and spectral resolutions. The end result is that the disaster managers continue to face challenges in undertaking preparedness, response, and recovery efforts due to the difficulty in accessing information in near real-time about flood severity, flood locations, and extent.

To assist first responders and emergency managers, specifically, in developing countries, an ensemble model (a.k.a. Model of Models) was developed that incorporates hydrodynamic model flood outputs to forecast global flood severity daily at sub-watershed level, and calibrates severity based on earth observation data products from optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar imageries. The flood severity is then used to disseminate alert messages to stakeholders on the ground using Pacific Disaster Center DisasterAWARE platform. This open access global alerting system and open-source model has been operational since 2022 and is now being used by the United Nations, the World Food Program, and stakeholders from Asia and Africa to undertake emergency management activities.

The following initiatives are underway:

* Youth engagement as youth climate catalyst to support on planning and implementation of climate change adaptation/disaster risk reduction in selected 10 municipalities that represent all three ecological zones of Nepal.

* Coding Climate in Movies—an initiative that would help spread messages on climate actions at institutional, community, and personal levels through changes in the policies, behavior, and practices.

* Glacier melting is one of the major impacts of climate change in the Himalaya. Glacial lake outburst floods are a threat for people downstream of the 47 critical glacial lakes. After successful glacial lakes lowering (Tsho Rolpa and Imja), Nepal is preparing to reduce the lake levels of Lower Barun, Lumding Tsho, Dona, and Hongu 2.

* Multi-layer farming initiative is a means of climate change adaptation for the most marginalized community members in some of the most flood-prone districts of Nepal. It has been recognized as a locally led adaptation measure to increase the income of the marginalized community members, which enhances their coping capacity for the impacts of climate change-induced disaster.

* Drought has been one of the major threats for the people of Nepal. Interventions in Khotang and Okhaldhunga, such as lifting irrigation, rainwater harvesting, construction of conservation ponds, and water recharging using trenches have been promising for the people who have been suffering from drought for many years.

Disaster resilience is a matter of human resilience. The U.S.-Japan Human-Centered Data for Resilience (HCD4R) workshop gathered nearly 40 leading experts in the natural and applied sciences, engineering, and sociology to identify opportunities where collaborations can advance a more human-centered approach to disaster resilience research through impactful infrastructure and initiatives.

Identified Opportunity Areas:

* Advance a framework for HCD4R by (a) creating a formal ontology to guide the creation and collection of future HCD4R data, (b) establishing a unified framework to integrate HCD4R data longitudinally after disasters, and (c) establishing processes to integrate relevant legacy datasets for the immediate study of HCD4R.

* Establish a U.S.-Japan shared infrastructure for a cross-national, interdisciplinary collection of longitudinal human-centered resilience data after disasters, including data collection workflows and protocols for participants to generate pre-event baselines and post-event impact, response, and recovery data.

* Establish a multi-scale modeling environment that incorporates physical, social, and cyber data to simulate impacts and recovery for multiple hazards, as well as human actions at various scales, from individual risk perceptions to policy interventions, with the ability to incorporate wide-ranging sources of uncertainty.

* Develop the next generation of human decision models to (a) capture how humans perceive and respond to risks in different hazard and cultural contexts and (b) use this understanding to advance risk communication capabilities accordingly.

Cross cutting all areas is the need to value and compensate the time of contributors who will help to create and operationalize HCD4R.

Read the full report.

Wonder Labs works to center the voices of students and emerging scholars in wildfire risk reduction efforts with the Reimagining 2025: Living with Fire Design Challenge. The objective of the design challenge is to enable student-led teams to engage with communities in processes of reimagining inclusive, just, and sustainable pathways to living and working with fire. See related panel discussion, research article, call for submissions, and policy recommendations.

Selected teams co-develop projects with communities at high risk of wildfire impacts, with a focus on socially vulnerable and historically marginalized demographics. The aim is to develop a more robust characterization of fire-adapted communities across social geographies, while highlighting diverse pathways to get there.

The first cohort (2021) engaged in reimagining inclusive Community Wildfire Protection Planning in Ventura County, California; defensible space in Santa Barbara County, California; community and forest resilience in Boulder County, Colorado; and inclusive evacuation planning in Marin County, California. The second cohort (2022-2023) focused on reimagining forestry and fire workforce capacities for inclusive, equitable, and just outcomes by engaging youth in the Community Wildfire Protection Plan process in Nederland, Colorado; developing forestry and fire career pathways for justice-impacted people in the Bay Area, California; and partnering with diverse young people to contribute to improved fire governance in the United States.

Apply to participate in the third cohort (2023-2024), details here.

Crisis informatics, the study of disaster-based information flow, has reached an impasse. For more than 15 years, researchers have attempted to show the value of information retrieval, machine learning, and artificial intelligence techniques using data generated during disaster events. Despite that well-funded work, there has yet to be any sort of success. The result is a slow-moving crisis where the labor of researchers can be continually overlooked by practitioners. Along with this, the lack of engagement with technology by emergency management could lower the likelihood of acceptance of the broader communities around computation. In our work, we highlight how and why technological production needs to significantly shift the viewpoint of its work. From supporting practice to the consequences of the bleeding edge, we offer suggestions about how to enhance the technological capacities of emergency management now and in the near-future.

A growing body of community resilience literature emphasizes the importance of social resources to prepare for and respond to disturbances. In particular, scholars have noted that community-based organizations and strong social networks positively contribute to adaptive capacity, or the ability to adjust and respond to change while enhancing the conditions necessary to withstand future events. While it is well established that strong civic engagement and social networks contribute to enhanced adaptive capacity in times of change, there is more to learn about how adaptive capacity at the civic-group and network level is impacted temporally by multiple and compounding crises. Research has shown that the ability for communities to adapt and respond to crisis is closely tied to longer term recovery. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has overlapped and intersected with multiple climate crises and reignited the ongoing American reckoning with racial injustice, the ability for communities to adapt and respond to compounding crises seems more crucial than ever. Our work uses qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 34 civic environmental stewardship groups in New York City to explore their role in building adaptive capacity. 

Social scientists have long assessed how to best communicate information about disaster risk to diverse members of the public. While there is now a substantial body of empirical literature on this topic, research findings do not always reach the emergency management practitioners who are best positioned to apply these lessons in their community engagement efforts. Additionally, socially vulnerable populations—those that face disproportionate disaster risk due to a variety of historical, social, economic, and political conditions—may not receive practical and actionable communications about disaster risk due to barriers they face.  

This project is designed to bridge this research-to-practice gap and to empower a new generation of risk communication leaders. In a multi-year partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the Natural Hazards Center team synthesized the state of knowledge on risk communication, with a particular focus on the needs of the most vulnerable populations. This free guidance was published in the form of an Annotated Bibliography for Risk Communication Involving Vulnerable Populations, a Principles of Risk Communication Guide, and Principles of Risk Communication Worksheets. 

In 2022 and 2023, the Natural Hazards Center used these foundational resources to develop practitioner trainings, including interactive group activities and case studies to help apply relevant concepts in their respective contexts. The Center also trained more than 70 USACE personnel in two virtual multi-week courses and a two-day intensive training. Results from participant pre- and post-assessments show significant growth across all learning objectives areas, with positive feedback from attendees.

Learn more: https://hazards.colorado.edu/news/research-projects/risk-communication-and-social-vulnerability.

The Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ) is proposing a method for measuring the resilience performance of buildings. Furthermore, based on the downtime during disasters, AIJ proposes the criteria of the business continuity planning performance of buildings. Buildings that can recover within one week are classified as three stars, those that can recover within three months are classified as two stars, and those that can recover within six months are classified as one star. They have also proposed a specific assessment method using a mid-rise office building as a case study.

The Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Shimizu Corporation, and Ohsaki Research Institute are expanding the AIJ resilience concept to lifetime assessments of buildings. It could include the down times of building occupancy for series of earthquakes such as East Nankai trough, West Nankai trough, and Tokyo earthquake. A building's lifetime resilience performance is evaluated by the relationship between the actual usable floor area throughout the building's lifetime and the projected available floor area during the planning phase. The building's lifetime resilience performance is evaluated by dividing it into components such as planning and maintenance, structural elements, non-structural components, and facilities. Furthermore, each component is assessed from the perspectives of aging, damage from hazards, and recovery capacity.

During the construction of the Line 3 tar sands pipeline in northern Minnesota, thousands of activists, both White and Indigenous, joined together on the frontlines to resist the pipeline. This alliance of Indigenous and White activists might seem surprising given the long history of settler colonialism—an ongoing process whereby settlers attempt to permanently remove original inhabitants from their land through dispossession, erasure, and genocide.

What practices did the movement against Line 3 employ to enable collaboration across Indigenous-White lines? Drawing on 24 interviews and a year of participant observation of frontline activism, my analysis suggests that the primary practice through which the movement attempted to facilitate collaboration  was the instruction to “follow Indigenous leadership.” This practice, implemented through movement discourse and reinforced in interactions, encouraged White activists to come to the frontlines to resist the pipeline; discouraged White domination of discussions, decision-making processes, and media coverage; increased White activist awareness of Indigenous perspectives and concerns; and created relationships lasting beyond the end of pipeline construction. Activists were aware of some complexities, questions, and problems that remained, however, including overly deferential behavior from White activists, tokenization, appropriation, and White saviorism. I argue that for climate justice movements, developing social norms rooted in social justice principles to guide work across difference, implemented through discourse and reinforced in interactions, can help to address power inequalities and sustain alliances, but, over time, these norms must develop additional nuance to account for unanticipated problems.

In 2020 and 2021, the Natural Hazards Center—with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation— issued two special calls for proposals to support research on public health disasters and community resilience in the five inhabited U.S. territories. Twenty-six projects were funded across the two award cycles, supporting 111 investigators and report authors.

The Natural Hazards Center is currently evaluating the Public Health Disaster Research Award Program’s impact, focusing on following questions:

How has the program contributed to training a diverse next generation of public health disaster scholars and professionals?

What advancements in public health and interdisciplinary research related to disaster and community resilience in the U.S. territories have resulted from the program?

How has the program enabled awardees to build connections and collaborations with representatives of public health agencies, community-based organizations, and other public health researchers and professionals?

What public health tools, policies, programs, databases, and other research applications have been developed by awardees supported by the program?

In March 2023, we distributed a questionnaire to the 26 principal investigators of each funded project asking about the program’s impact on their team’s professional development and any new advances in their research during the eight to 20 months since their awards ended. We received 22 completed questionnaires and are currently evaluating the quantitative and qualitative responses as well as administrative and other secondary data. We will submit a full report of our findings to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in August 2023.

U.S. states, territories, and tribal areas develop state hazard mitigation plans (SHMPs) to reduce harm in the event of a disaster. Every five years, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) requires that these plans be updated. Recently released guidance from FEMA suggests that revised plans included a greater focus on socially vulnerable populations—or those populations that often have fewer resources to mitigate disaster harm due to political, social, and economic factors. Identifying and understanding these populations is crucial for reducing harm, making their inclusion in SHMPs essential for mitigation.

This research, which focuses on a 10-state Midwest region, will involve interviews with state hazard mitigation officers (SHMOs) and others involved in developing mitigation plans and including social vulnerability considerations. Interview questions will explore topics such as: (a) crafting and updating the plans—who writes the plans? (b) support—how much assistance or guidance do SHMOs receive in integrating vulnerability and updating plans? (c) resources—what resources do the authors draw on? (d) normative expectations—what social factors influence the plans and the inclusion (or exclusion) of vulnerable populations; and (e) practical applications—how are the plans used when working with marginalized populations or communities?

Researching this area of the Midwestern United States is important because it often experiences "low attention” disasters where communities with smaller population centers experience disproportionate harm. This research will help illuminate how and why social vulnerability considerations are integrated into the mitigation planning process in the Midwestern United States.

The Southeast Texas Urban Integrated Field Lab (SETx-UIFL), funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, aims to provide quantitative understanding of projected climate change impacts across the Southeast Texas region that is generalizable to other regions. It will also work to improve the practice of resilience science and community resilience using new generalizable theories of change validated in the SETx-UIFL. To achieve these goals, the team coordinates numerous disciplines, scholars, and community stakeholders toward short-term goals: (a) integrating new data, methods, and models about interactions among natural, human-built, and social systems; (b) increasing understanding of the interdependencies, mutual benefits, and trade-offs of different well-being outcomes for humans and the environment; (c) co-producing knowledge with stakeholders; and (d) centering concepts of social equity in urbanized regions across spatial and temporal scales.

Our major goals are to:

* Quantify how climate and land cover change will affect flooding patterns and how community-driven mitigation of flooding using green infrastructure will alter local water and carbon cycles;
* Quantify how future climate scenarios will affect air pollution and how models can capture urban scale heterogeneities in air pollution exposures;
* Conduct participatory planning processes to develop equitable strategies that address climate-related acute and chronic events across an urban region;
* Foster environmental, climate, and disaster equity using locally calibrated vulnerability indicators;
* Build partnerships across different institutions and community partners including University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Lamar University, Prairie View A&M University, and Oak Ridge National Lab.

Communities today face an increasingly complex set of challenges. Disruptions from a range of acute shocks, such as natural disasters, pandemics, cyberattacks, infrastructure failure, and loss of key industries, are becoming more frequent and intense. Additionally, communities and systems are experiencing chronic stressors such as aging infrastructure, environmental degradation, and persistent poverty, which negatively impact quality of life and well-being, worsen the impacts of shocks, and undermine our ability to recover and thrive. Increasing national resilience is a complex undertaking and requires unified engagement across systems at all levels to build our collective resilience, so the nation not only survives, but prospers, in the face of these ever-evolving challenges. 

However, the connection between stressors and shocks is often not reflected in disaster and community planning efforts, resulting in many important stakeholders not seeing themselves as a core part of the solution or being unsure of their role in resilience. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is spearheading an effort to create guidance and resources for the whole community to help everyone understand and fulfill critical roles related to increasing national resilience. These resources will promote a common understanding of resilience, incorporate the relationship between stressors and shocks, and address the critical roles of all stakeholders by building on foundational principles that include an all threats and hazards approach. It is people-centered and equitable, adaptive, collaborative, sustainable, and interdependent.

The Washington State Department of Commerce Energy Resilience and Emergency Management Office is kick-starting a new energy resilience program. This program specifically targets smaller, historically disadvantaged communities and assists them in accessing new and unprecedented funding opportunities in clean/renewable energy projects leading to increased energy resilience. While these funding investments are critical to communities, there are often application requirements that can be barriers to success or entry. The program works to overcome these barriers by supporting project elements such as public outreach and engagement, planning, hazard identification, feasibility studies, research, and application preparation. Our team includes expertise in emergency management, vulnerable populations, data visualization, energy resilience, and planning. We also have access to additional technical energy expertise as needed.

Energy resilience projects can offer communities a multitude of benefits beyond mitigating power disruptions, including educational benefits, workforce development opportunities, and the potential to share generated power with households burdened by energy costs. We meet communities where they are, working to support their identified goals and meet their definition of success. Along with energy resilient communities, we help build working relationships that can be sustained for continued community strength.

Beyond the goal of serving communities across the state of Washington, this program provides a framework for other state governments to implement similar community driven, bottom-up energy resilience programs. Our most vulnerable populations are disproportionately impacted by climate change and disaster events. Our responsibility is to ensure all communities have the support they need to achieve an energy resilient future. Come chat!

The Natural Hazards Center recently released a special collection of Research Counts focused on the Disaster Cycle. Published collaboratively with the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, this collection details key findings from recent research on disaster preparedness, emergency response, impacts, recovery, mitigation, and resilience. The pieces are short and written for a broad audience of emergency managers, disaster risk reduction professionals, and policymakers in the hazards and disaster field.  

The 10 easy-to-read articles condense studies to help those working in the field stay current with disaster cycle research. The collection has a multi-disciplinary and multi-hazard focus and contains insights from domestic and international perspectives in disaster management. For example, two preparedness articles highlight research from New Zealand and Finland, and other articles focus on studies in the United States, Canada, Chile, and China. Collectively, these articles address tsunamis, pandemics, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, and media coverage of disasters. 

A wider aim for this Research Counts special collection is to encourage communities everywhere to consider which disaster phases might need more attention. Additionally, these articles are designed to inspire scholars to consider new ways to contribute to the field of hazards and disaster research.

For more information, please visit the The Disaster Cycle Special Collection Index.

The Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) was established in 2018 with the support of the National Science Foundation. SSEER is a global network of social scientists who study hazards and disasters. SSEER identifies researchers to develop the social science workforce and coordinates social science research teams in large-scale disasters to advance scholarship on the root causes and human consequences of extreme events.

To identify members of the social science hazards and disaster research workforce and their respective areas of expertise, SSEER releases an annual census report on the status of the research workforce. The annual reports are available in color and black and white and are free to download. In addition, SSEER hosts an interactive global web map that includes the names, titles, organizational affiliations, and locations of well over 1,400 social science researchers who agreed to be mapped. There are additional layers that allow users to search by researcher disciplinary foci, methodological expertise, the types of hazards and disasters they study, and the events they have researched. Please visit the SSEER web map applicationhere. All social scientists who study hazards and disasters are invited to join SSEER. More information is available on the CONVERGE website.  

Tropical cyclones can cause considerable loss to agriculture, including direct physical damages to crops, livestock, and animal production, and destruction of farm infrastructure such as buildings, farm equipment, irrigation systems, etc. Rapid and accurate estimates of agricultural damage and loss caused by hazard events are vital to decision-making processes related to disaster response, ad-hoc aid, long-term recovery, and the sustainability of agricultural production. To date, data availability and the unique characteristics of agricultural production have limited the timeliness, accuracy, and defensibility of estimates, as well as the level of detail provided. This persistent lack of reliable data and insights impedes a complete understanding of the economic consequences of natural disasters in agriculture. In addition, often only the wind swath of a particular tropical cyclone is used to identify the agricultural lands impacted by the event. Less attention has been paid to the rapid estimation of losses associated with heavy rains or flooding from tropical cyclones due to the high levels of complexity and uncertainty involved in precipitation intensity and flood map estimations. We have been working on developing a suite of reliable and ready-to-use baseline data and allied methods to produce timely and accurate estimates of direct agricultural production loss after a tropical cyclone in Florida. The work also helps us identify issues in agricultural data sources and how a baseline data framework and rapid assessment methods can contribute to decision support and policy development.

The objective of our project is to develop new risk communication strategies and update existing ones that effectively connect public preferences, perceptions, and behavior in today's information age with emergency management risk communication. The aim is to enhance compliance with protective actions and combat misinformation. This study will specifically focus on the 18 coastal counties of Texas, examining the following research questions within the context of hurricane evacuation and return-entry:

1. What are the information preferences of households and emergency management professionals regarding risk communication?

2. What are the information needs of households, and are there any gaps between these needs and emergency management messages?

3. How effective are various information channels and risk messages in achieving household compliance with emergency management messaging?

4. What are the perceptions of misinformation held by households and emergency management professionals that are relevant to disaster risk communication?

By partnering with the Texas Division of Emergency Management and collaborating with emergency management professionals, media representatives, and a stakeholder advisory board consisting of experts and practitioners, this project will generate new scientific knowledge. This knowledge will serve as the foundation for co-producing a risk communication guidebook for emergency managers. The findings of this project will advance our understanding of risk communication in the modern information age, with a particular focus on exploring the impact of misinformation, trust, and social media on Texas communities during hurricanes.

The protective benefits of breastfeeding for maternal and infant health are critical, and even more so during a community-wide natural disaster. Breastfeeding provides cost-effective and essential protective benefits for the mother and baby. Breastmilk is readily available at the right temperature and uniquely adjusts to the baby's caloric and immune needs, therefore offering food security and protection from disaster-related illnesses.

My upcoming qualitative study will explore personal experiences and disaster-related factors that influence breastfeeding amid a disaster in the Southern United States from the mother's perspective. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews will be conducted between May 2023 and December 2023. Data will be analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Reflexive thematic analysis is a more flexible approach that is not intended to be followed rigidly, therefore offering the flexibility to incorporate additional frameworks. Capitalizing on the flexibility of this method, resilience, and communication, maintaining health, independence, support, and transportation  frameworks will inform this work. This conceptual framework depicts the process that the mothers go through to address stressors encountered during a community-wide natural disaster that impacts the achievement of their breastfeeding goals.

This study will bring voice to women and act as a launching pad, informing future research, operational protocols, and all-hazards plans for breastfeeding during emergencies, thereby strengthening the mother-baby dyad resilience by meeting their actual needs to help them meet their breastfeeding goals.

Disaster ethics is an emerging discipline that intersects the fields of disaster/crisis management and applied ethics. The normative objective of this discipline is to better integrate ethics to reduce risk, improve response, and improve societal well-being.

Research into ethical decision-making in a disaster is important because hazards will continue to affect the global population. Likewise, exacerbation of vulnerability via poor preparedness and structural inequalities continues unabetted. Also, ethical issues seem to only be recognized as problematic after the fall out.

There are three phases of this research in 2023-2024 with two more planned for 2024-2025.

1. Globally-based interviewees and survey respondents (Feb-May 2023) were asked about professional decision making during a disaster: if there were ethical issues and which ethical principles they used. Through analysis of professional reflections, I gained an understanding of what ethical principles drive disaster decision-making. Publications are forthcoming.

2. Individuals will attend a disaster ethics tabletop exercise (June 2023) where outcomes from Phase 1 will be applied to an ethics-focused disaster scenario. Participants will focus on their ethical decision making while navigating the decisions of other participants. This scenario will check what ethical principles each profession uses during a response against what they reflectively said they use.

3. The Disaster Ethics Workshops (Phase 3) are an opportunity to discuss proposed changes to the training and ethical guidance materials of each profession. This will facilitate the finalization of training/guidance materials offered to professional bodies as ethical enhancements to professional development related to disaster response.

My dissertation is an intersectional, multi-level analysis of Mexican immigrant women and their vulnerability in post-disaster recovery. For Part I, I conducted an intersectional and critical document analysis of federal, state, and local disaster recovery planning and policy documents in the U.S. (n=155). Research Question: How does current U.S. disaster policy address issues related to gender, ethnicity, and citizenship status?

For Part II, preliminary interviews with service providers from community-based organizations (n=16) were conducted in 2019 in Houston, Texas. Interviews focused on Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall in 2017. I conducted follow-up interviews with providers (n=8) in 2021 to understand how subsequent disasters Tropical Storm Imelda (2019), Winter Storm Uri (2021), and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-current) affected their efforts to assist Mexican immigrants in the four years since Harvey—with a specific focus on women’s experiences. Research Question: How do service providers from community-based organizations navigate disaster recovery systems to assist Mexican immigrant women and their families in their long-term housing recovery, particularly in the context of cumulative disaster impacts?

For Part III, I conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with Mexican immigrant women (n=56) to understand their recovery from their point of view, with a focus on how gender stratification, legal status, housing tenure, and access to organizational assistance affect recovery trajectories. Research Questions: How are Mexican immigrant women navigating the system of disaster recovery to move forward in their long-term housing recovery? And how does cumulative exposure to multiple disasters impact long-term housing recovery among Mexican immigrant women in disaster-affected areas?

Increased climate change and coastal population growth have escalated the risks of destructive extreme weather events such as hurricanes, therefore increasing the urgency of conducting studies on coastal household risk perceptions and behaviors to improve resilience policies. However, hurricane evacuation studies still lack understanding of household decisions about the trade-offs between property protection and life safety among alternative protective actions. This project is designed to close this gap using a case study of the 2022 Hurricane Ian.

Since the beginning of the project in January 2023, the research team has conducted a field investigation to collect post-disaster street-view imagery data to assess building damage and developed a survey instrument to investigate household protective action decision-making and trade-off processes. The survey was then randomly distributed to households in Lee County (sampled in the field investigation) and Hillsborough County in Florida. The research team is expected to finish survey data collection during this summer, and then use the data to (a) compare respondent perceptions against risk levels as evaluated by experts; (b) develop statistical and machine learning models to analyze protective action decisions; and (c) build a trade-off model of decision-making among multiple protective actions. This project will enhance scientific knowledge of household emergency responses to hurricane threats by extending the Protective Action Decision Model and gathering critical data in communities significantly impacted by Hurricane Ian.