Research and Practice Highlights

This project aims to investigate innovative construction methods to tackle the challenges of affordable housing and disaster reconstruction in the United States, with a focus on prefabricated wood components. By exploring offsite construction techniques, including manufactured wood components, the study seeks to enhance housing affordability, particularly in the aftermath of disasters. The project will feature two illustration-build events, comparing traditional construction methods with offsite components such as floor trusses, wall panels, and roof trusses. A time-motion study will quantitatively analyze efficiency gains, offering valuable insights into time and cost reductions. Additionally, the project will conduct a market study, gathering data from interviews, surveys, and focus groups with event participants to uncover barriers to the widespread adoption of these methods. Findings from both phases will guide a workshop with key stakeholders to develop strategies to overcome these challenges and encourage the use of offsite construction techniques in both affordable housing and disaster recovery efforts. The ultimate goal is to reduce construction costs and timelines while improving housing resilience, particularly in disaster-prone regions. By addressing both practical obstacles and perceptual challenges, this research will offer actionable strategies to boost the adoption of prefabricated components, fostering the growth of affordable housing and more efficient disaster recovery. The project began on February 4 and scheduled to conclude in March 2026.

In recent years, there has been an increase in extreme weather events in geographic areas where this type of weather is uncommon. Studies have demonstrated that climate change and the warming environment can affect both the social determinants of health and the global burden of diseases. Increased occurrences of extreme weather events associated with the climate crisis, and infectious disease (re-)emergence, reinforces the importance of exploring the interaction between naturally occurring hazards, social culture, health, and stress. The climate crisis is a global health concern and a political issue that requires understanding of the relationship and potential interaction between health, justice, and equity. To understand this relationship each parameter, health, justice and equity, can be viewed as a syndemic risk factor within a syndemic. Using an explanatory case study and the syndemic theoretical framework, this research examines the interconnectedness of extreme weather and the social determinants of health on the impact of Hurricane Ida in the New York City geographic area. This research integrates methodology from disaster epidemiology and anthropology to describe and measure potential impacts of extreme weather events on sub-populations of unique vulnerable communities. The outcomes from implementing this methodological approach can inform evidence-based policy and program development to build disaster resilience.

Following Hurricane Maria in 2017, Puerto Rico’s communities have taken the lead in recovery efforts, continuing to address the challenges caused by fragile energy infrastructure, soaring food prices, a healthcare system crisis, and the persistent threats of natural hazards. This study explores the ongoing efforts within the realms of energy, food security, healthcare, and natural hazards to better understand how local communities are navigating these challenges and identify the types of support that could further bolster these initiatives. Through a series of virtual and in-person interviews, the author is identifying the triggers for the establishment of community-led initiatives and organizations, which are often driven by a lack of resources and services available to the population. This lack is frequently compounded by unreliable transportation infrastructure that isolates certain areas, especially in the aftermath of extreme weather events. Moreover, the author is identifying the challenges faced by community organizations during their operations while exploring how they envision overcoming them. The co-production of knowledge resulting from this investigation will inform policy recommendations that will be provided to relevant stakeholders to identify priorities and needs that can better support community-led efforts in Puerto Rico.

This study analyzes the status of evacuation planning for flooding risks in Puerto Rico. The island is prone to tropical storms and seismic activity, events which can trigger subsequent flooding, tsunamis, or submarine landslides. Our work begins by reviewing existing scholarship to inform our investigation of local policies and procedures for evacuation planning. To assess the effectiveness of evacuation planning efforts in all 78 municipalities of Puerto Rico, we developed a framework encompassing six key factors (or protocols). These municipalities are grouped into the island’s eight electoral districts to evaluate which ones demonstrate advanced efforts in flood risk management and evacuation planning. We describe each protocol and categorize which municipalities implement these measures, assigning them a rank from zero to six. We then test our framework by analyzing two events that occurred in 2025: the tsunami alert in Aguadilla and the state of emergency declared in several municipalities due to severe flooding in April/May. As a result, we introduced a sub-factor in our framework to qualitatively assess the appropriateness of the protocols. This study concludes with policy recommendations for local governments on how to improve flood and tsunami evacuation planning.

Disaster risk reduction (DRR) has changed over the past 50 years, but not much. My contention is that change is slow (or even reversed) because the processes that cause people to be vulnerable (to hazards and now climate change) are not being dealt with. They reside in systems of power in which those who dominate can maintain their self-interest and manipulate the language that is used to think about and frame disaster risks. For instance, earthquake preparedness is possible in some countries because it can co-exist with capitalist priorities of profit seeking and does not challenge existing power structures. It took a long time, but this has been realized in some countries, such as Japan and the United States. In other countries—including Turkey, India, Bangladesh and perhaps still China—the elite remain unconcerned about people’s safety. The issue is not about encouraging "good governance" (whatever that means) but recognizing that some systems of power are not compatible with creating safety for people. While under the control of those elites, "good governance" are meaningless buzzwords. Language therefore constrains progress. Other buzzwords reproduce the status quo and restrict the ability to challenge the root causes of vulnerability. These bogus buzzwords include "community" and "resilience" which are mostly used by outsiders to suggest that progress can be made through "participatory" and grass rooted actions that avoid analyzing why (some) people within the so-called "community" are experiencing risk. Does anyone ever go back after 10 years to see if the project "worked"?

Societies around the globe face serious challenges in dealing with compounding hazards and identifying potential solutions for community resilience. The Portland State University Research and Education for Cascading Hazards And Resilient Group Engagement (RECHARGE), funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research Traineeship Program (NRT), addresses these challenges through a transdisciplinary Social-Ecological-Technological Systems framework, engaging diverse community partners. The RECHARGE NRT focuses on the causes, consequences of, and community responses to cascading natural hazards. Facing a combination of climate-related hazards (e.g., floods, droughts, heat, wildfires) and other geohazards (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, volcanic eruptions), the Pacific Northwest offers an excellent laboratory for investigating how society reacts to the complex dynamics of overlapping hazards through the lens of coupled social, ecological, and technological systems. Master’s and Ph.D. graduates of RECHARGE NRT will develop novel capacities to apply a convergence approach to tackle grand challenges in cascading hazards and emergency management, with an explicit focus on how these unfold in the urban-rural nexus. Our NRT model will integrate research and education through a combination of coursework, project-based experiential learning, community internships, undergraduate mentoring, research ethics training, public impact research, and science communication. These experiences will prepare participants to develop networks and skills needed in a range of career pathways. RECHARGE NRT will include a critical assessment of student learning, changes in institutional structures, trainee satisfaction and success, and progress in establishing a sustainable model for transforming graduate education at Portland State University. 

Traditional rural settlements in western China represent vernacular cultural landscapes, inhabited and evolving environments shaped by generations of human–nature interaction. These settlements embody indigenous knowledge of space and environmental adaptation. However, post-earthquake reconstruction has often replaced these culturally rooted landscapes with standardized housing, overlooking their environmental performance and social significance. To address this challenge, we propose a convergent framework that integrates field surveys, environmental simulation, participatory mapping, and choice-based preference modeling to guide resilient recovery. This approach risks degrading both environmental performance and cultural value, revealing a persistent tension between conservation and development. Microclimate modeling assesses how traditional spatial forms contribute to thermal comfort and ecological responsiveness. Public Participation Geographic Information Systems map local knowledge and recovery priorities. Discrete Choice Experiments uncover how residents negotiate trade-offs among design alternatives that relate to habitability, cultural identity, and environmental function. Research findings demonstrate that bridging vernacular wisdom with scientific modeling and participatory planning can help mediate the conflict between heritage conservation and post-disaster development. It offers a replicable strategy for post-disaster habitat design grounded in local wisdom and community values.

Last year, researchers supported by the University of British Columbia's Disaster Resilience Research Network (DRRN) conducted a first-of-its-kind systematic scoping review of academic literature on disasters and resilience in British Columbia, Canada. In the process, graduate fellows Charlotte Milne and Taylor Legere screened 4,403 records and fully analyzed 343 documents, taking note of the specific hazards, events, research methodologies, and specific locations in British Columbia that were referenced. Their findings were written into an article co-authored by DRRN members Jonathan Eaton, Sara Shneiderman, and Carlos Molina Hutt, and published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. (Read the paper here.) Along with the written paper, Charlotte and Taylor developed a pair of visual aids to help researchers identify academic literature focused on specific hazards and disasters in British Columbia. These include a map of British Columbia that geolocates hazards and disasters referenced within the reviewed literature, and a timeline that captures each event referenced in the reviewed literature, along with the documents that refer to it. Both the map and timeline are best viewed on a large screen.

In 2024, the United States experienced 27 billion-dollar extreme weather catastrophes, causing $182 billion in damages and 568 lives lost. The task of building resilience against such extreme weather events falls upon a mosaic of 90,000 local government entities. Many of these communities are understaffed and ill-equipped to assemble large-scale funding needed for resilient infrastructure. There are over a trillion dollars in value in the form of grants, tax exemptions, and credits that the federal government provides annually to state and local governments. In 2024, a record $500 billion in new municipal bonds were issued, bringing the total municipal bond market to over $4 trillion. However, equity challenges remain as under-resourced communities often lack the capacity to understand, apply for, and manage all the available grants and resources. Amid funding freezes and increasingly uncertain federal funding landscapes, Airys aims to be a chief-finance-officer-in-a-box that can empower these communities to navigate these hurdles and finance their infrastructure. First, we have compiled a comprehensive training dataset of restoration and resiliency projects from across the country, and are continuing to expand it. Next, using this dataset, we are building AI-powered tools to help communities search, understand, and optimize how they can finance new and existing projects. For the city, this will result in a blended capital stack of federal/state grants, philanthropic funds, and private capital (green bonds and low-interest loans)—an actionable roadmap for how they can clearly fund important resilience projects. 

Communities are increasingly being affected by complex environmental and climatic risk events due to growing climate variability. In response to these changes, timely and spatially informed decision-making is more important than ever. Sentinel GreenReport® Plus (SGR+) is a real-time, dynamic web application developed by KansasView using Google Earth Engine to monitor vegetation health, detect land cover changes, and identify climate anomalies across the United States. This interactive tool supports a wide range of users from researchers and land managers to farmers and policymakers in making timely, sustainable, and resilience-oriented decisions. The platform leverages 10-meter resolution Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to produce on-demand Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) greenness maps across user-defined areas and time periods. Users can explore vegetation conditions in near real-time and compare them with prior-year baselines, and long-term historical averages. Crop-specific NDVI analysis is available through integration with U.S. Department of Agriculture's Cropland Data Layers, while PRISM Climate Data adds critical context by showing current-year temperature and precipitation trends relative to historical norms. Originally inspired by the NASA-funded classic GreenReport® series of 1996, this modernized version transforms a legacy idea into a scalable and responsive decision-support system supporting a broad range of applications from drought monitoring and post-disaster vegetation assessment to land use change detection and climate-sensitive resource planning. By combining accessibility, geospatial intelligence, and interactivity, SGR+ bridges the gap between satellite observations and locally actionable insights. It empowers hazards researchers and practitioners to adopt more anticipatory, data-informed, and equitable approaches to environmental risk reduction in a rapidly changing world.

Policymakers at every level of government are grappling with the rising costs of natural disasters and how best to aid affected communities. As disasters grow more frequent and severe, their costs strain public finances and increase the urgency to update budgeting practices to more effectively plan for changing spending needs. The Pew Charitable Trusts has led several studies about how states manage the fiscal impact of disasters, each of which showed that conventional approaches leave state budgets vulnerable. A new issue brief from Pew identifies steps government leaders can take to improve disaster budgeting in the face of rising costs. The brief recommends that states (a) track costs to capture the total impact of disasters on state budgets, (b) bolster traditional budgeting practices with proactive tools, and (c) prioritize efforts that reduce disaster harms. These three key principles—measure, manage, and mitigate—address states’ primary obstacles in dealing with the uncertainty and fiscal risks that disasters create. Within this framework, How States Can Build Disaster-Ready Budgets provides policymakers with detailed guidance and actionable strategies to increase fiscal resilience to increasingly frequent, severe, and costly disasters.