Department of Earth Sciences
Seminar Series - Fall 2023
Dr. Christopher Burton - UConn Department of Geography
Friday September 29th - 12:30PM - McHugh 306
Capturing Disaster Context: The Measurement of Resilience to Hurricane Hazards along the Mississippi-Alabama Gulf Coast, USA
How communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from the impacts of natural hazards and disasters is conceptualized in terms of their resilience. Communities that can increase their resilience are in a better position to absorb damage impacts, for instance, and recover from them when they occur. As a result, there is strong interest in the ability to measure resilience. Metrics aimed at measuring resilience suffer from several key limitations, however. For instance, hazard and community context are often ignored and most indicator-based methods represent a broad-brushed approach that might neglect the true underlying drivers (or lack thereof) of resilience within communities.
The purpose of this seminar is to present an integrated measurement approach to better understand drivers of resilience to hurricanes using “top-down” quantitative and “bottom-up”, stakeholder-led approaches. The research presented will include the identification of context-specific characteristics that drive the resilience of communities along Mississippi and Alabama's working waterfront accounting for hazard, community, and livelihood contexts. With improved resilience metrics, it will be possible to provide governments, risk managers, community and business leaders, and researchers new and robust opportunities to create local initiatives and equitable public policy programs to increase the capacity of communities to mitigate, respond, and recover effectively and efficiently from damaging climate-related events.
For more information, contact: Christin Donnelly at christin.donnelly@uconn.edu