Welcome to Place Resilience
A newsletter about people, their communities, and disasters
Writing about the science and policy of hazards, disasters and climate change
I’ve been wanting to start this newsletter for a long-time. First, introductions - I am Andrew Rumbach, a researcher who studies the complex interactions between people, places and extreme weather and climate events. Put simply, my research addresses two fundamental questions: why are communities vulnerable to disasters and climate change? What should we do about it?
I’ve been researching these questions for a long time. Over the years I’ve published papers and reports on disasters ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the 2009 tsunami in American Samoa, 2013 floods in Colorado, and the recent Marshall Fire. I’ve examined many different factors of disaster vulnerability, like manufactured housing and informality. I’ve also had the great fortune of working directly with state and local governments to support their post-disaster recovery decision-making. All of my work is focused on the goal of making our communities safer.
Why this newsletter? Why now? I recently joined the Urban Institute as a Senior Fellow in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center. I am working with a terrific group of policy researchers who focus on climate and communities. With my new role I have the luxury of thinking everyday about the connections between disaster and climate change research and policy-making. This newsletter will be a way to share my thoughts and engage with the many people who are thinking about similar things.
What can you expect? This newsletter will be about the science and policy of disasters and climate change, and specifically what we should do about them. As with everything we do at the Urban Institute, this newsletter will be non-partisan and focused rigorously on research and evidence. I will be reviewing scientific studies and literature, examining existing and proposed policies, commenting and analyzing disaster events, and anything else that seems related and important. I hope you will join me!
Situational context can include geographical references such as physical locations or infrastructure. Geographic locations can create unequal vulnerability to climate-related catastrophes. This includes the location of towns, cities, and rural communities and the infrastructure located within them.
Urbanization has led to population density and other attributes resulting in vulnerability to climate-related disasters. This has been noted regarding the extreme heat being experienced in states like California, where the term “heat island” has become common.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), heat islands are found in highly urbanized areas where roads, asphalt-paved areas, and building rooftops have been found to retain heat and increase local temperatures by up to 7°F. A lack of green spaces in these areas only heightens this effect.
Additionally, rural communities are also at an increased risk of susceptibility to natural disasters due to a comparative lack of infrastructure. Because of their isolation, they also may not have the financial or material resources readily available to address extreme disaster situations. Obtaining funding, training, mutual aid agreements, equipment, technology, and disaster declarations can be more difficult for these communities due to the low population and a smaller tax base. The agricultural industry, which serves as the bedrock of such communities while also being highly susceptible to climate change, has historically been allocated a lower percentage of funding compared to other sectors. Finally, the most well-known examples of situational context contributing to resilience issues affect coastal communities. The increasing frequency and intensity of storms, hurricanes, tropical cyclones, flooding, and rising sea levels create vulnerability due to a lack of appropriate building codes, lack of financial capacity to make necessary infrastructure modifications, land degradation, lack of sufficient evacuation routes, insufficiently robust buildings, and the affordability of flood insurance. FEMA has recently updated its flood premiums in its new Risk Rating 2.0 pricing methodology, which has resulted in unexpected increases for many homeowners that may make the coverage too costly to afford.