Aaron Clark-Ginsberg

@aclarkginsberg on Twitter

Behavioral/Social Scientist

Off Site Office

Education

Ph.D. in humanitarian action, University College Dublin; M.S. in humanitarian action, University College Dublin; B.A. in American studies, Kenyon College; B.A. in environmental studies, Kenyon College

One Page Bio

Overview

Aaron Clark-Ginsberg (he/him) is a behavioral/social scientist at the RAND Corporation who has been researching disasters for more than 10 years. His projects span the disasters gambit, with a recent focus on three primary areas of inquiry: disasters and community, disasters and health, and disasters and measurement. Clark-Ginsberg leads projects and has published broadly in these areas. He also leads RAND's Mass Migration Strategy Group, where he supports RAND's community of researchers engaging in mass migration research. Clark-Ginsberg earned his Ph.D. at University College Dublin; his dissertation focused on disaster governance, and included fieldwork in 10 developing countries with the international NGO Concern Worldwide. Before joining RAND, Clark-Ginsberg was a postdoc researching critical infrastructure cybersecurity regulations at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Research Focus

Commentary

Critical Infrastructure Protection

Ohio's Train Derailment—Not Spy Balloons—Is the Real National Security Threat
The slow degradation of infrastructure and disaster response is less a spectacle than an overflying balloon, but the train derailment and chemical spill in Ohio highlights just how bizarre such a focus on perceived external national security threats has become. The far greater threat may be from within.
Feb 20, 2023
Los Angeles Times
Earthquakes

Earthquake in Turkey, Syria: Insights from RAND Researchers
Thousands of people have been confirmed dead in one the strongest earthquakes to hit Turkey and Syria in the past century. As search-and-rescue missions ended and recovery began, a handful of RAND researchers shared some of their initial thoughts.
Feb 14, 2023
The RAND Blog
Cybersecurity

Preparing for a Cyberattack Starts at the Local Level
The ongoing Russian war in Ukraine has highlighted the need for federal, state, and local level emergency managers to prepare to respond to a cyberattack with widespread impacts that significantly disrupt critical infrastructure.
Apr 18, 2022
IAEM Bulletin
Petroleum

How We Might Better Live with Oil in California
As California grapples with the question of balancing environmental stewardship with the recent renewed focus on “local oil,” lawmakers could look to local communities for the best answers to avoid future petro-disasters.
Apr 1, 2022
CalMatters
Displaced Persons

To Help Climate Migrants, We Must First Recognize Them
Despite the large and growing population displaced by extreme weather, there is no common definition of a “climate migrant.” Once we get a clearer sense of just who is a climate migrant, policy efforts should begin focusing on the full fabric of life in our communities, creating systems that will help migrants become a part of that fabric in safe and dignified ways.
Jan 28, 2022
The Hill
Emergency Preparedness

Hurricane Ida Is Part of a Cycle of Disasters—Mitigating Their Impact Means Building Back Better
Building back better means focusing on recovery that not only restores damage from a disaster but also reduces future risk. To meet that goal today, we need to look at the ways our disaster preparedness and response systems actually create risk themselves, by reinforcing things like wealth inequality, systemic discrimination, or access to crucial services.
Sep 13, 2021
CNN
Wildfires

Climate Change Is Only One Driver of Explosive Wildfire Season—Don't Forget Land Management
The fire seasons that have been scorching huge areas and wiping entire towns from the map appear to be the future. Accepting that wildland fires are a part of our environment and working to live with fires rather than continuously fighting against them may be the most responsible path forward.
Aug 16, 2021
The Hill
Workplace Well-Being

As Fire Season Heats Up, Burnout Looms
Increasingly intense fire seasons are taking a physical and mental toll on wildland firefighters. Without more direct attention paid to firefighters' mental health, burnout could decimate the ranks of those who protect lives and property across the West.
Jul 21, 2021
The RAND Blog
Disaster Recovery Operations

Four Strategies to Reduce Disaster Risk in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Contexts
Addressing the circumstances for the more than two billion people living in fragile and conflict-affected contexts is crucial for delivering on the United Nations commitment for disaster risk reduction. Four strategies can help reduce risk and improve resilience for these communities.
Jul 9, 2021
PreventionWeb
Displaced Persons

For Americans Uprooted by Climate Change, Mental Health Is the Next Crisis
The challenges climate migrants face are not limited to basic needs, such as housing and employment; displacement may also create trauma. It's imperative that policymakers take mental health into account when devising climate change policies.
Mar 15, 2021
The Hill
Refugees

Climate Change Migration: Developing a Security Strategy for All
Over the past decade, an average of 21.5 million people annually have been forced to move due to the impacts of extreme weather. Building an understanding of the intersection between climate change, migration, and security is crucial and should take into account that many who face the most direct impacts of climate change are already among the most vulnerable.
Mar 15, 2021
The National Interest
Emerging Technologies

Tech Alone Isn't Enough to Create a Successful Smart City
Smart-city initiatives are popping up in small communities and large metropolitan regions alike. But these initiatives have run into significant hurdles. Some cities have developed frameworks to overcome these challenges, but many continue to struggle.
Feb 10, 2021
Route Fifty
Community-Based Participatory Research

Local Communities Need a Voice in How to 'Build Back Better'
Long before it was popularized and made its way into political slogans and economic recovery battle cries, the phrase “building back better” was a central tenet of disaster recovery and community resilience. How should community voices be incorporated into “building back better” processes?
Jan 12, 2021
The RAND Blog
Natural Hazards

Disaster Reporting and Its Impacts on Policy and Inequities
Disaster news tropes may capture audience attention, but they ultimately frustrate progress in mitigating the short- and long-term effects of disasters on communities. It's more important than ever that news stories about disasters frame the effects of environmental phenomena in meaningful ways.
Nov 16, 2020
Poynter
Disaster Recovery Operations

What's Missing From Community Disaster Response? The Whole Community
Across the United States, significant gaps exist in disaster response needs and capabilities. Community volunteers have stepped up to fill those gaps where possible. They may need more support and resources.
Nov 9, 2020
The National Interest
Wildfires

Another Record-Breaking Fire Season Shows the Need for a Comprehensive Strategy
Year after year, fires across western U.S. states scorch forests, rangeland, and neighborhoods, wreaking havoc on rural economies and pushing smoke into cities. Policymakers should consider a coordinated and comprehensive effort that brings together the best minds in government, communities, and academia.
Nov 6, 2020
United Press International
Energy Security

The Downside of a Lean Electric Grid
The electric grid is central to U.S. national security. Recent disasters provide an example of the downsides of leanness. It's more costly to be less lean, but given our dependence on the electric grid and the increasing prevalence of disasters, safety and resilience may be greater priorities.
Oct 13, 2020
The Hill
Emergency Preparedness

How COVID-19 Sheds Light on Disaster Policy's Need to Prepare for Multiple, Sequential Emergencies
The pandemic has highlighted the vulnerabilities many disaster-affected households face. As lawmakers debate a second relief package, they could reconsider how the emergency management framework responds to the effects of simultaneous hazards on individual-assistance and community-recovery programs.
Aug 11, 2020
Urban Wire
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Planning for the Upcoming Hurricane Season in Light of COVID-19
What if Hurricane Katrina had hit during a pandemic? Emergency planners can prepare for this scenario by evaluating current response system capacity, evacuation and sheltering procedures, food and supply issues, and more.
May 4, 2020
Vox
Homeless Populations

Emergency Homeless Services During the COVID-19 Crisis
The recently passed $2 trillion stimulus package includes a suite of measures designed to support households that are affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. But policymakers may want to consider what protections the package offers to a particularly high-risk group: people experiencing homelessness.
Apr 7, 2020
The RAND Blog

Publications

Report
Community and Individual Disaster Resilience for Floods: Options for Improving Protective Action Guidance
This report describes options for Department of Homeland Security officials to improve protective action flood guidance and messaging in response to growing flood risks that continue to cause adverse effects and threaten lives and property.
May 8, 2023
Journal Article
Collective Action by Community Groups: Solutions for Climate Change or Different Players in the Same Game?
This article investigates how community groups solve collective action problems though data gathered across 25 organizations in three sites—Sitka, Alaska, USA; Toco, Trinidad; and a global site of distributed citizen science organizations.
Mar 8, 2023
Journal Article
Capacities of Health Systems in Climate Migrant Receiving Communities: Insights in the US Gulf Coast
This report examines how health care delivery systems in receiving communities meet the needs of climate migrants in three case study sites in the US Gulf Coast.
Mar 1, 2023
Journal Article
International Humanitarian Narratives of Disasters, Crises and Indigeneity
Narratives are a means of making sense of disasters and crises. We identify and characterise narratives in humanitarian communications involving Indigenous Peoples by conducting a narrative analysis of humanitarian communications.
Feb 22, 2023
Journal Article
Social Vulnerability Shapes the Experiences of Climate Migrants Displaced by Hurricane Maria
The purpose of this study is to understand the experiences of climate change related migrants. To do so we draw on focus group discussions with Puerto Ricans in South and Central Florida displaced by 2017 Hurricane Maria.
Feb 21, 2023
Journal Article
Older Adults' Behavioral Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic
This chapter synthesizes findings from existing research on the behavioral health implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we consider differences across the life course and the relative resilience of older adults.
Jan 25, 2023
Journal Article
Humanitarian Policymaking as Networked Governance: Social Network Analysis of the Global Compact on Refugees
This article uses social network analysis to understand policymaking from a networked governance perspective. We examine one of the most significant refugee policy processes, the efforts to formulate and adopt the Global Compact on Refugees.
Nov 2, 2022
Journal Article
Informality, Violence, and Disaster Risks: Coproducing Inclusive Early Warning and Response Systems in Urban Informal Settlements in Honduras
This research examines the coproduction of early warning systems linked with response capacities for floods and landslides through the case study of work in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with a focus on nine urban informal settlements with high levels of territorial gang violence.
Sep 2, 2022
Journal Article
An Urban Governance Framework for Including Environmental Migrants in Sustainable Cities
This article proposes an urban governance framework for including environmental migrants in sustainable cities.
Aug 19, 2022
Journal Article
Efforts to End a Stalemate in Landslide Insurance Availability Through Inclusive Policymaking: A Case Study in Sitka, Alaska
We explored how participatory techniques could overcome one disaster risk financing-related stalemate: the case of landslide insurance in a highly landslide-prone location, Sitka, Alaska.
Jul 28, 2022
Report
Planning for Significant Cyber Incidents: An Introduction for Decisionmakers
This report describes contingency planning for a significant cyber incident, focusing on the importance of planning, the process of developing a plan, and options for operationalizing it. It summarizes a companion how-to guide by the same authors.
Jun 27, 2022
Journal Article
Conceptual Framework for Understanding Incident Management Systems During Public Health Emergencies
We present a conceptual framework of incident management drawn from expert feedback, and a review of literature on incident management and related fields.
Jun 1, 2022
Journal Article
Disasters and Indigenous Peoples: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Expert News Media
In this article, we aim to understand framings of Indigenous peoples in disaster management through a critical discourse analysis of how Indigenous peoples in disasters are represented in the expert news media.
May 19, 2022
Report
Managing Response to Significant Cyber Incidents: Comparing Event Life Cycles and Incident Response Across Cyber and Non-Cyber Events
This report examines U.S. structures and processes for non-cyber emergency management and whether U.S. officials can learn from these other incidents to help public and private sector stakeholders improve preparations for response to cyber incidents.
May 12, 2022
Report
Addressing Climate Migration: A Review of National Policy Approaches
In this paper, RAND researchers analyze the variety of policy responses that countries have proposed or implemented to address climate mobility, as well as the reasons for pursuing those policies.
Dec 7, 2021
Journal Article
Disaster Risk Creation and Cascading Disasters Within Large Technological Systems: COVID-19 and the 2021 Texas Blackouts
Here we describe the 2021 Texas blackouts during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of disaster risk creation and cascading disaster, showing how risk emerges and propagates across large technological systems.
Oct 15, 2021
Journal Article
When Disaster Management Agencies Create Disaster Risk: A Case Study of the US's Federal Emergency Management Agency
This study is the first to examine disaster risk creation from an organizational perspective, and the first to focus explicitly on how disaster management agencies can shape risk creation.
Sep 28, 2021
Journal Article
Risk Technopolitics in Freetown Slums: Why Community-Based Disaster Management Is No Silver Bullet
Chapter from "Critical Disaster Studies" (Penn Press, 2021) detailing a study of Sierra Leone and proposing that community-based disaster risk management actually distracts from larger social and political root causes of vulnerability.
Aug 1, 2021
Journal Article
Delivering the Promise of Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Contexts (FCAC): A Case Study of the NGO GOAL's Response to the Syria Conflict
This paper offers a case study of international NGO GOAL's programming that responds to the protracted crisis in Syria, with critical discussion on SFDRR and how to adapt humanitarian relief and disaster resilience.
Apr 22, 2021
Journal Article
The Family Crisis Migration Stress Framework: A Framework to Understand the Mental Health Effects of Crisis Migration on Children and Families Caused by Disasters
We synthesize relevant theories and models of disaster, migration, and family resilience to create a framework to organize the complex processes that occur within families as a result of migration and that affect the mental health of children.
Mar 2, 2021
Journal Article
Smart Cities as Large Technological Systems: Overcoming Organizational Challenges in Smart Cities Through Collective Action
In this article, we argue that the main challenges policymakers confront in deploying 'smart cities' technologies are organizational rather than technological.
Jan 26, 2021
Journal Article
Communication Missteps During COVID-19 Hurt Those Already Most at Risk
Emergency risk communication is a crucial part responding to crises, but it's also a critical part of preventing negative outcomes from communication missteps.
Dec 17, 2020
Journal Article
Practitioner Approaches to Measuring Community Resilience: The Analysis of the Resilience of Communities to Disasters Toolkit
In this article, we present the Analysis of the Resilience of Communities to Disasters (ARC-D) toolkit, a practical toolkit developed by an international aid organization, GOAL, over the course of a decade of practice.
Nov 1, 2020
Journal Article
Hybrid Governance of Disaster Management in Freetown, Monrovia, and Dar Es Salaam
This article introduces a hybrid governance perspective to disaster management. Hybrid governance refers to situations where state and non-state actors collectively provide key services.
Sep 16, 2020
Journal Article
A Complexity Approach for Reducing Disaster Risks for Marginalized Urban Populations: Comparing DRR Interventions Across Four Cities
This chapter conceptualizes cities and their risks as a complex adaptive system and examines the methods for risk reduction.
Sep 3, 2020
Journal Article
Disaster Risk Reduction in Cities: Towards a New Normal
This chapter introduces some of the key issues facing scholars and practitioners of disaster risk reduction in urban areas, which are now home to over half of the global population.
Sep 3, 2020
Journal Article
Maintaining Critical Infrastructure Resilience to Natural Hazards During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Hurricane Preparations by US Energy Companies
This article describes the ways that an energy organization, the regional transmission operator PJM, is preparing for hurricanes during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article has implications for policy makers working to maintain infrastructure resilience to natural hazards during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Aug 11, 2020
Report
How Smart Cities Could Improve Open Data Portals to Empower Local Residents and Businesses: A Case Study of the City of Los Angeles and COVID-19
In this Perspective, the authors provide generalizable strategies that city leaders could adopt to improve the utility of their open data portals to facilitate local access to information and promote community-based problem-solving.
Jul 27, 2020
Report
Building Community Resilience to Large Oil Spills: Findings and Recommendations from a Synthesis of Research on the Mental Health, Economic, and Community Distress Associated with the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
In this report, the authors explore how communities, government officials, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and scientists can build community resilience to large oil spills.
Jul 6, 2020
Journal Article
Disaster Risk Reduction Is Not 'Everyone's Business': Evidence from Three Countries
The author examines disaster risk reduction (DRR) by answering the following questions: Who are the main types of actors involved in DRR in different countries, how do they work together, and how much variation is there between countries?
Feb 1, 2020
Report
Deterring Attacks Against the Power Grid: Two Approaches for the U.S. Department of Defense
The Defense Department increasingly relies on electric power to accomplish critical missions. This report explores two approaches for deterring attacks against the U.S. power grid: deterrence by denial and deterrence by cost imposition.
Jan 6, 2020
Journal Article
Regulating Risks Within Complex Sociotechnical Systems: Evidence From Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Standards
One of the first empirical studies of the effects of mandatory cybersecurity regulations for critical infrastructure.
Nov 27, 2018
Journal Article
Comparing Networked and Linear Risk Assessments: From Theory to Evidence
Assessing whether networked risk assessments match the actual cascades that occur during disasters can provide a process for further refinement of assessment tools by uncovering their strengths and weaknesses.
Jul 10, 2018