Due to persistent and serious threats from natural disasters around the globe, many have turned to resilience and vulnerability research to guide disaster preparation, recovery, and adaptation decisions. In response, scholars and practitioners have put forth a variety of disaster indices, based on quantifiable metrics, to gauge levels of resilience and vulnerability. However, few indices are empirically validated using observed disaster impacts and, as a result, it is often unclear which index should be preferred for each decision at hand. Thus, we compare and empirically validate five of the top U.S. disaster indices, including three resilience indices and two vulnerability indices. We use observed disaster losses, fatalities, and disaster declarations from the southeastern United States to empirically validate each index. We find that disaster indices, though thoughtfully substantiated by literature and theoretically persuasive, are not all created equal. While four of the five indices perform as predicted in explaining damages, only three explain fatalities and only two explain disaster declarations as expected by theory. These results highlight the need for disaster indices to clearly state index objectives and structure underlying metrics to support validation of the results based on these goals. Further, policymakers should use index results carefully when developing regional policy or investing in resilience and vulnerability improvement projects.

Five years ago, a massive earthquake and its subsequent aftershocks rocked the core of Nepal. Recovery from these quakes has been a long and difficult process. This thesis will explore findings from a qualitative evaluation of Lumanti Support Group for Shelter, an NGO in Kathmandu, Nepal that implemented a residential reconstruction program in four peri-urban communities in Kathmandu Valley. These findings are a culmination of 26 semi-structured interviews and document analysis. This research highlights the processes of reconstruction and the forms of resistance that occurred through disaster governance.

specialcollections@tulane.edu / Communities situated in high-hazard fire-risk zones are experiencing larger fires even after decades of fire suppression techniques have been implemented. While fire suppression mitigates the dangers short-term, as the cost of suppression rises and fires become more uncontrollable long-term sustainability is lost. Suppression techniques have left more kindling in denser forests while allowing invasive species to take root causing native species suffer due to their dependence on fires. The invasive species feed flames at a faster rate than native species, increasing the likelihood of an uncontrollable fire. The solution: adapt to living in a fire environment. Architecture and controlled fires are tools to making peace with raging wildfires. If a forest is born to burn, let it, and design accordingly. Specifically, this thesis concentrates on design opportunities such as firebreaks, community engagement, technology, and fire festivals for humans to live with wildfire. These elements mitigate wildfires while also resulting in assets for the community. This thesis seeks to redesign a fire devastated community to demonstrate the potential of fire-safe strategies. / 1 / Jacqueline Esmay

This research examines the relevance of an automated requisitioning system on an emergency supply chain's performance. In this context, "automated requisitioning" refers to the ability to transmit requisitions through an automated method that can be viewed and acted upon by multiple members of the supply chain. Automated requisitioning suggests some sophistication compared to manual methods which include phone calls, email and text messaging. These manual methods carry an implied higher probability of error and also have a limited capacity to process higher volumes of requisitions. Emergency supply chains are characterized by some demand that can be anticipated and other demand that must be addressed through a requisitioning procedure. Two subcategories of emergency supply chains are military expeditions and nongovernmental organizations. While military and disaster relief supply chains each provide supplies to different customers, they are similar in their need to both push and pull required commodities. Although military supply chains support soldiers while disaster relief supply chains provide relief to people in need, both supply chains involve pushing supplies while requesting specific needs based on the particular situation, overall addressing a demand that is largely unknown. This research examines the role automated requisitioning plays in the midst of these push and pull systems by simulating automation in a military expedition, then generalizing the results to suggest conclusions regarding a disaster relief supply chain.

The premise of this thesis is that complex socio-environmental problems, such as those associated with urban disaster risk and climate change, cannot be managed by individual organisations or hierarchical forms of organisation, but require integrated, inclusive, and multi-actor forms of governance. By adopting the concept of 'disaster governance' and by drawing on governance discourse, this thesis argues that multiple actors with various capacities and understanding of the problem should be involved in disaster management processes. This thesis demonstrates that in practice, however, a collaborative, decentralised, and inclusive disaster governance approach, which often involves actors outside of taken-for-granted networks, is harder to design, implement, and maintain in cities of the global South. In this thesis, an embedded qualitative case study approach is adopted to explore how the local municipality in Cape Town manages flood risk in one of their high-risk informal settlements called Sweet Home, which is located in Philippi on the Cape Flats. Qualitative data is collected from in-depth, semi-structured interviews and multi-actor workshops with local government officials in Cape Town, residents from Sweet Home informal settlement, and non-governmental organisations involved in flood management activities. This research uses a nodal governance approach to describe and analyse the unique mentalities, resources, technologies, and institutions that shape actors' actions and decisions with regard to flood governance. Added to this is an in-depth look at what barriers might be present as a product of these characteristics, and how these barriers impact on the ability of these actors to collaboratively address disaster risk. This thesis demonstrates that by unpacking these characteristics and the potential barriers, the conditions needed to strengthen disaster governance can then be identified.

In this study, we propose a mixed-integer linear programming model for a Heterogeneous Fixed Fleet Drone Routing problem (HFFDRP) that minimizes the post-disaster inspection cost of a disaster-affected area by accounting a number of drone trajectory-specific factors into consideration such as battery recharging costs, servicing costs, drone hovering, turning, acceleration, constant, and deceleration costs, and many others. The trajectories between each pair of nodes are constructed using a path construction model. Two heuristic algorithms are proposed, namely, Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) algorithm and Modified Backtracking Adaptive Threshold Accepting (MBATA) algorithm, to solve the largest instances of our proposed optimization model. Computational results indicate that the proposed MBATA algorithm is capable of producing high-quality solutions consistently within a reasonable amount of time. Finally, a real-life case study is used to visualize and validate the modeling.

Governments provide resources that enable people and neighborhoods to return to normalcy after emergencies, which enhances community resilience. Past research found that such resources are not always equitably utilized by communities, where oftentimes communities with high social vulnerability receive fewer resources. COVID-19 was one of the largest and most widespread public health emergencies. In response to the emergency, the United States (U.S.) government sponsored the creation and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. COVID-19 vaccines reduce the probability of severe illness and death, making them an important resource for community resilience. This study uses an explanatory sequential mixed methods research design to examine three research questions related to social equity in vaccine administration: (1) What is the relationship between community social vulnerability and COVID-19 vaccine administration?; (2) Did individuals trying to access the COVID-19 vaccine encounter administrative burdens?; and (3) How do the administrative burdens experienced by individuals when trying to access the COVID-19 vaccine provide a better understanding of the relationship between social vulnerability and COVID-19 vaccine administration? County level data for all U.S. counties were analyzed to examine the first research question. Findings indicate that there was an association between counties with higher wealth-related social vulnerability and lower county vaccination rates, but counties with higher employment-related and ethnicity-related social vulnerability were associated with higher vaccination rates. Qualitative interview data from 31 individuals revealed that few individuals faced administrative burdens when trying to access the COVID-19 vaccines, but a variety of resources and support services were used to access the vaccines. However, not everyone had equal access to resources, as individuals indicated that resources required wealth for access, and many resources were provided by employers. In addition, results revealed that ethnicity often presented psychological barriers to getting vaccinated. These results suggest that the resources invested in vaccination efforts materialized for some, but not all types of vulnerability. Emergency managers and policymakers should consider these results when providing resources meant to enhance community resilience following future emergencies and crises.

Health and well-being are key focuses for international organizations and governments around the world as one of the United Nations' (UN) Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs). The emergence of COVID-19 pandemic since late 2019 has led to not only substantial life losses, but also negative social and economic impacts that are relatively comparable to the "Spanish Flu" pandemic. The insights from public administration literature suggested that emergency and crisis management require collaborative efforts from various stakeholders across sectors and levels. However, the existing literature that studied the COVID-19 pandemic response under network perspective is still scarce in developing countries, especially in Thailand in particular. Understanding the structures of the COVID-19 pandemic response networks and their effectiveness can provide insights for not only scholarly theoretical development, but also lessons learned for practitioners in developing future pandemic response system. The current study builds upon the network governance literature by providing multiple case studies of Thailand's provincial COVID-19 pandemic response networks. Specifically, it is aimed to explore the characteristics of the network structures in COVID-19 pandemic response networks in Samut Sakhon province, and the relationship between network structures and network effectiveness of this initiative. Furthermore, the current study is also aimed at comparing the network structures and network effectiveness between different geographical-administrative structures, as well as between different policy processes, to examine the influence of the regional administration and the local municipality administration on the provincial COVID-19 pandemic response networks in Thailand. This study applies a Multi-Theory, Multi-Level Network Governance (MTML) framework as key conceptual framework for studying Thailand's provincial COVID-19 pandemic response networks. It adopts a comparative multiple-case case studies research design with the purposive sampling and snowball sampling strategies. The semi-closed-ended roster of the organization list and interviews were used for social network data collection. Descriptive social network statistics, network visualization, and MR-QAP regression are key data analyses methods for this study. The descriptive findings suggest that Thailand's provincial COVID-19 response networks in Samut Sakhon province demonstrate the centralized network structures that the provincial administration actors and the district administration actors are the key policy actors in several network relationships in all districts and at the provincial level. The explanatory analyses suggest that policy institutional rules networks and the actual policy ties are key predictors for the resources allocation networks in all districts and the provincial networks, whereas there is no consensus for network characteristics as predictors for perceived network effectiveness. Study's theoretical contributions, its limitations, and implications for research and practice are also discussed.

Over the past two decades, public organizations have been encouraged and, at times, required to incorporate evidence in their decision-making processes. Evidence broadly refers to data and or knowledge that is gathered, analyzed, and used to generate a conclusion. Despite arguments and the intrinsic assumption that using evidence to inform decisions will improve organizational performance, there is limited empirical research to support this assertion. The proposed study addresses this gap in research and others in the context of local flood risk management. Specifically, using primary data gathered from local floodplain managers and secondary data from the US Census and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), this study seeks to determine (1) the extent to which organizations responsible for managing flood risks exhibit a culture that uses evidence to inform decision making; (2) the predictors of an organization exhibiting a culture that uses evidence to inform decision making; (3) whether organizations exhibiting a culture that uses evidence to inform decision making experience better flood risk management performance outputs (e.g., implementation of mitigation measures) and outcomes (e.g., increased flood resilience); (4) the types of evidence organizations use to manage flood risks; (5) the type of evidence that is associated with better flood risk management performance outputs and outcomes; and (6) whether knowledge of an effective flood risk management program for improving organizations' ability to deal with potential climate change impacts influences an organization's decision to adopt the program. Data gathered from an online survey of 342 floodplain managers in Florida and Texas provided insights into these six research aims. First, respondents reported their organization moderately uses evidence to inform decision making. Additionally, the main factors impacting an organization's culture of evidence usage was if the community had experienced more presidential disaster declarations and if the floodplain manager identified as male and had obtained the Certified Floodplain Manager (CFM) licensure. Results also indicated that an organization's culture of evidence usage had not statistical effect on flood risk management performance outputs and outcomes. Rather, the main factors impacting flood risk management performance outputs and outcomes include perceptions of flood risk, participation in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Community Rating System (CRS) program, employee capacity to use evidence, and organizational capacity to manage flood risks. Respondents reported a slightly higher usage of professional evidence compared to scientific evidence; however, neither type of evidence were associated with better flood risk management performance outputs and outcomes. Finally, knowledge of an effective flood risk management program for improving organizations' ability to deal with potential climate change impacts did not appear to influence an organization's decision to adopt the program.

The recent increase in the number of disasters and complexities surrounding existing emergency management efforts necessitate cross-sector collaboration and coordinated response. While previous scholarly works have discussed emergency management efforts from a collaborative perspective, little consideration has been paid to the role public-private-nonprofit partnerships (PPPs) play in emergency management and disaster response. Understanding the outcomes of PPP can be particularly important for emergency managers who make decisions under uncertain conditions and complex situations. The purpose of this study is to operationalize emergency management PPPs and assess the role of these networks on three outcomes organizational resilience, PPP institutionalization, and PPP effectiveness. To this end, this study developed an interdisciplinary conceptual framework using literature from public administration, emergency management, and health management disciplines. Using the proposed conceptual framework, this study designed a web survey for emergency managers and operators (i.e., practitioners) in public, private, and nonprofit sectors in Florida. The findings of this study can help emergency managers across multiple sectors and policymakers to better understand the factors that contribute to successful PPPs in emergency management and assist them in planning for, managing, and utilizing their resources when collaborating with other organizations in response to disasters. This study also provides policy and practical implications for federal agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as local emergency management offices from public, private, and nonprofit sectors.