Six Disaster and Climate Topics I'll be Writing About in 2024
After getting my bearings in a new role and new city, I’ve got big plans for Place/Resilience in 2024. I plan to write about anything that I find interesting or useful in the knowledge ecosystem around disasters, climate change and community resilience, but there are six topics that I will give extra attention to:
Federal Legislation. An exciting part of joining a policy think-tank is that I have an incentive to follow the disaster and climate change legislative process more closely and with greater access to lawmakers. There are lots of interesting things happening right now in the House and Senate, from bi-partisan legislation to create a single federal disaster assistance application to ongoing efforts to make permanent the CDBG-DR program and create a National Disaster Safety Board. I’ll be writing about some of these bills with an eye towards the evidence - what does research tell us about the importance or potential efficacy of these laws and programs?
The FEMA Learning Agenda: The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 requires that federal agencies create ‘learning agendas’ that outline their priority research questions and describe the data and evidence that would be necessary to answer them. Some agencies, like Housing and Urban Development, use their learning agendas to strategically guide their investments in applied research. Others, like FEMA, do…less. What is FEMA’s learning agenda, and how would I modify it? What questions would I prioritize, and why? This series will be a fun thought experiment that I hope some readers will join in on by proposing key research questions from their own perspectives and vantage points. Who knows, maybe someday FEMA will even *gasp* fund research?
Insurance and the Financialization of Risk. Insurance has become the hot topic of our field in the past year, as major insurers have begun pulling back from markets with significant disaster and climate risk. At the same time, financialization concepts like catastrophe bonds have grabbed more attention and may play a major role in the realization of concepts like the Community Disaster Resilience Zones. I need to get a lot smarter on these topics, from household insurance to bond ratings to resilience-focused investment vehicles. Expect a bunch of posts that explore these topics from the ground-up.
Alternative Housing Models and Resilience: I’ve long admired the resident-ownership movement that is spreading among mobile home park communities, and scholars have described how such alternative models for land ownership can spur resiliency investments. In places like Lyons, Colorado, deed-restricted homes have created an alternative path for affordable home ownership post-disaster. This year I’ll be thinking and writing more about these housing approaches and how they might help alleviate issues of ‘disaster gentrification.’
Capacity. For years I’ve been writing about the challenges of managing disasters and environmental risk in ‘small’ places, globally and in the United States. Simple dichotomies like urban/rural don’t capture the myriad ways that smallness shapes disaster and climate risk. This year I’ll be digging deep into a concept that is often indicated as to why small places tend to suffer greater losses, i.e. their lack of capacity. Capacity (and its antidote, ‘capacity building’) has a long and complicated history, especially in international and community development, and a lot of fertile intellectual and empirical ground has been tilled. What can we learn and usefully apply to our work on building place resilience?
Incorporation. I have also spent a lot of my career studying how places outside of cities manage risk. As an urban planner I am particularly interested in how land-use regulations and standards can vary dramatically from place-to-place, even within a single metropolitan region. This year I will be focusing especially on households and communities located in unincorporated areas, i.e. places that fall outside of incorporated towns or cities. I’ll be looking at research on how incorporation influences (positively or negatively) household and community risk, and paying particular attention to examples like Colony Ridge where developers have intentionally built in unincorporated places to take advantage of minimal development restrictions, including floodplain development standards.
What topics in the disaster and climate zeitgeist have you most interested going into 2024?
