BACKGROUND: It is widely documented that people with a mobility disability are at increased risk of severe illness, morbidity, or mortality following a disaster. However, disaster risk is multifactorial and not simply a result of underlying conditions. There is a need to examine contributors to dis- ability experiences during a pandemic, and strategies to account for these in pandemic response. METHODS: Using grounded theory methodology, we employed iterative, inductive coding, and constant comparative methods. Sixteen people with a mobility disability from Ontario and Quebec, Canada, participated in 1-hour qualitative interviews (ages 20-86). Participants' disability etiology included stroke, multiple sclerosis, amputations, and other. RESULTS: The pandemic was a source of dis-ability for the whole population, making disability disparities more noticeable and highlighting the role of adaptive capacity in disaster resilience. Although COVID-19 compounded existing barriers faced by people with a mobility disability, participants were able to mobilize their assets (i.e., individual capacity, mobility assists, etc.), empowering them to take action to maintain autonomy. When the general population experienced barriers to social connection, adaptations to support resilience were at the forefront of policy decisions. New solutions, including digital infrastructure, demonstrated the potential to diminish existing barriers by providing accommodations to meet the accessibility needs of people with disability, especially for regular healthcare provider contact. CONCLUSION: The COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to break the cycle perpetuating health-related inequities. Pandemic planning, response, and recovery can be reformed toward disability-inclusiveness with systemic changes focused on human rights and physical and psychosocial needs of people with a mobility disability.

Research has shown that unless global greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by 45% by 2030 the global warming could rise with 1,5 °C and increase the risk of floods. This is due to an intensification of extreme weather events and rising sea levels. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the flood preparedness in Swedish municipalities to get a better understanding how flood management was performed in practice and what obstacles municipalities may face. In addition to this, the study also aimed to see if preparedness differed between municipalities based on geographical location, flood risk classification or population. The study was conducted as a questionnaire that was sent out to all 290 municipalities in Sweden. The result indicated that a majority (89%) of the municipalities that participated (142) took floods into account in their risk and vulnerability analysis. Actions against floods were mainly focused on preventive and technical methods as well as increased cooperation. This study could not prove any differences in the flood preparedness based on geographical location, flood risk classification or population. Factors that posed limitations in municipalities abilities to effectively manage floods were lack of resources, restrictions in allocation of responsibilities or property rights. Areas of improvement that were noticed were that actions against floods could focus more on the municipalities ability to recover and learn from a flood event, as well as improvements in bridging the gap between the private and public sector to obtain a more cohesive preparedness capacity.

Flood risk management in the U.S. has contributed to overdevelopment in at-risk areas, increases in flood losses over time, significant deficits in federal emergency programs, and inequitable outcomes to households and communities. Addressing these issues in a cost-effective and socially equitable manner relies on the ability of policy analysts to identify and understand complex interactions that characterize coupled natural-human systems, and tools for accurate estimates of the risks that arise from these interactions. This dissertation addresses this need by developing and investigating a flood risk analysis system that integrates data on property locations, assessments and transactions, high resolution flood hazard models, and flood risk policy and impacts across the coterminous United States. We focus on the degree to which markets accurately value their exposure to flooding and its impacts, and the accuracy of procedures and tools to estimate flood losses. In the first chapter, we identify heterogeneous valuation of storm risk in the Florida Keys that depends on the presence of structural defense and proximity to damaged homes after Hurricane Irma. This result suggests that stranded assets, properties with increasing vulnerability to storms but unable to rebuild structures and recover wealth, and overvalued assets at risk, which raise disaster costs, can occur simultaneously. This runs counter to the common framing of competing drivers of observed market valuation. In the second, we show that conventional methods employed in flood loss assessments to achieve large spatial scales introduce large aggregation bias by sacrificing spatial resolution in inputs. This investigation adds important context to published risk assessments and highlights opportunities to improve flood loss estimation uncertainty quantification which can support more cost effective and equitable management. In the final chapter, we conduct a nationwide study to contrast the predictive accuracy of predominantly used U.S. agency flood damage prediction models and empirical alternatives using data on 846 K observed flood losses to single-family homes from 446 flood events. We find that U.S. agency models mischaracterize the relationships of losses at the lowest low and high inundation depths, for high-valued structures, and structures with basements. Evaluated alternatives improve mean accuracy on these dimensions. In extrapolation to 72.4 M single-family homes in the U.S., these differences translate into markedly different predictions of U.S.-wide flood damages to single-family homes. The results from this dissertation provide an improved empirical foundation for flood risk management that relies on the valuation and estimation of flood risk from county to continental scales.

This study was a year-long longitudinal qualitative research project using the case study of Mayfield, KY after the catastrophic tornado event that impacted their community on December 10, 2021. Oral histories were collected from 18 participants who lived in or were closely connected to Mayfield at the six month and 1.5 year marks after the disaster. Later, after the oral histories were archived and made available to the public, the transcripts were used to extract the crisis narratives from the oral histories and the data was thematically analyzed using the existing theory and theoretical framework of Narratives of Crisis: Telling Stories of Ruin and Renewal by Seeger and Sellnow (2016). The themes were analyzed to better understand how crisis narratives change over time and to determine if there were differences between the leadership of Mayfield and their stakeholders, the public. A major finding in this area was the intertwining of one of more themes within the same passage of narrative, including the intertwining of traditionally competing themes. This extends the theory of Narratives of Crisis. The Discourse of Renewal by Ulmer and Sellnow (2002) was also used to analyze how narratives may differ between those in the community who are considered leaders, and those who represent a general cross-section of the community. The major finding in this analysis was the lack of up-to-date information between leaders and the public. By not creating a bridge of communication, many of the successful steps taken by leaders may not have reached their intended audience. One of the components of the Discourse of Renewal, organizational learning, was specifically used to find lessons learned discussed by community leaders in Mayfield, and to explore how these learned lessons can be applied for practitioners to better understand disaster recovery and renewal in the future.

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Objective: A sizable body of literature has now examined posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms in youth in the aftermath of disaster. Meta-analysis is the preferred tool with which to inform funding decisions, service delivery, and public policy. Method: The present meta-analysis quantitatively synthesized this literature (k=96 studies; Total N = 74,154), summarizing the magnitude of overall associations between disasters and youth PTS, and identifying child, disaster, and study method factors associated with variations in the magnitude of these associations. Results: Despite variability across studies, disasters had a significant effect on youth PTS symptoms, falling in the small-to-medium range of magnitude. Aspects related to pre-existing child characteristics, the disaster and the child’s disaster exposure, and study methodology are significantly associated with variations in the magnitude of disaster effects on youth PTS symptoms. Specifically, female gender, higher death toll, closer proximity, personal loss, and perceived threat and distress at the time of the event were each associated with increased post-disaster PTS in youth. Regarding methodological factors, studies conducted within the first year postdisaster, studies that used established PTS measures, and studies that relied on childreport data identified a significant effect on youth PTS, whereas studies conducted after the first year, studies relying on non-established measures, and studies relying on parentreport data did not. Conclusion: In the aftermath of disasters, governmental funding agencies and private foundations provide substantial resources for child services following disasters. The present meta-analytic findings can help to inform optimal allocation of these resources and targeted intervention efforts, as well as the development and refinement of new interventions for youth suffering in the aftermath of disasters. / Psychology

Natural disasters exert a profound impact on the world population. In 2012, natural disasters affected 106 million people, forcing over 31.7 million people to leave their homes. Climate change has intensified natural disasters, resulting in more catastrophic events and making extreme weather more difficult to predict. Understanding and predicting human movements plays a critical role in disaster evacuation, response and relief. Researchers have developed different methodologies and applied several models to study human mobility patterns, including random walks, Lévy flight, and Brownian walks. However, the extent to which these models may apply to perturbed human mobility patterns during disasters and the associated implications for improving disaster evacuation, response and relief efforts is lacking. My PhD research aims to address the limitation in human mobility research and gain a ground truth understanding of human mobility patterns under the influence of natural disasters. The research contains three interdependent projects. In the first project, I developed a novel data collecting system. The system can be used to collect large scale data of human mobility from large online social networking platforms. By analyzing both the general characteristics of the collected data and conducting a case study in NYC, I confirmed that the data collecting system is a viable venue to collect empirical data for human mobility research. My second project examined human mobility patterns in NYC under the influence of Hurricane Sandy. Using the data collecting system developed in the first project, I collected 12 days of human mobility data from NYC. The data set contains movements during and several days after the strike of Hurricane Sandy. The results showed that human mobility was strongly perturbed by Hurricane Sandy, but meanwhile inherent resilience was observed in human movements. In the third project, I extended my research to fifteen additional natural disasters from five categories. Using over 3.5 million data entries of human movement, I found that while human mobility still followed the Lévy flight model during these disaster events, extremely powerful natural disasters could break the correlation between human mobility in steady states and perturbation states and thus destroy the inherent resilience in human mobility. The overall findings have significant implications in improving understanding and predicting human mobility under the influence of natural disasters and extreme events. / Ph. D.

Ph.D., Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, 2011 / In this study, the linkages between sustainable development, disaster-risk reduction and governance are explored, with reference to climate change adaptation. The purpose of the assessment is to ascertain the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of these inter-linkages with regard to climate change adaptation in South Africa. First, a brief review of theoretical debates on sustainable development, disaster-risk reduction, governance and climate change adaptation is given. Currently, it seems, sustainable development, disaster-risk reduction and governance are viewed exclusively from each other and from climate change adaptation. Some theoretical debates suggest that successful, long-term climate change adaptation can only be accomplished if linkages between these concepts, and practices, where relevant, are recognized in development policies. There is thus, a need to understand the relationships between climate change adaptation and development policy AND their linkages and tradeoffs. Coupled to this understanding, there is also a need to assess the role of institutions as well as institutional barriers that may retard or pose a threat to long-term sustainable adaptation. For this case study, the focus is on the 2004/05 drought that occurred in the Eastern Cape. The drought of 2004/05 was particularly severe. Some parts of the Eastern Cape were declared disaster areas. This declaration prompted responses from the various spheres of government, e.g. national, provincial and local. The intention therefore is, firstly, to gain clarity on the linkages between development/sustainable development policies, disaster-risk reduction and governance in the Province that operated during this period and in the periods following this drought. Secondly, the intention is to understand how the spheres of governance work together in responding to climate-related disasters. Responses from the community reveal that coupled to poor development planning; there is also limited and poor institutional capacity to respond to the direct and indirect impacts of climate variability and change. This poor institutional capacity is further complicated by a lack of coordination between the three spheres of government, i.e. national, provincial and local, as well as across national government departments. It is suggested that first, a good structure of cooperative governance and disaster-risk reduction is needed in South Africa. This structure should allow for multi-faceted and holistic development planning that focuses on saving lives, protecting livelihoods and assets. A good structure of governance should provide an environment that is sustainable and conducive to long-term climate change adaptation. What this case study also reveals is that monetary relief and assistance alone is not an effective response to climate variability and change. What is thus also needed is more vigilant monitoring of development projects and relief-funds as well as coordinated governance of development activities between national, provincial and local governments. Such an organized structure of governance could aid the country in gearing up for climate change adaptation.