Aaron Clark-Ginsberg

How Do We Make Early Warning and Early Action for Food Security More Effective?

Although food security early warning early action (FS-EWEA) has a track record of reducing food insecurity, it is designed for rural settings, and effective action remains elusive. Extending FS-EWEA to the millions living in fragile urban contexts requires answering four critical questions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Journal Article

Think Global, Act Local: Using a Translocal Approach to Understand Community-Based Organisations' Responses to Planetary Health Crises During COVID-19

We used a translocal learning approach to co-develop insights on community-based responses to complex health and environmental and economic crises.

Journal Article

Migration Narratives in Northern Central America: How Competing Stories Shape Policy and Public Opinion in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador

This report identifies and compares migration narratives within El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to understand how they influence critical policy debates and decisions in the region.

Journal Article

Climate Change-Related Mass Migration Requires Health System Resilience

Mass migration driven by climate change-related shocks and stresses is already occurring. We argue for a need for resilient health systems to ensure migration is adaptive, not detrimental, to health.

Report

Educating and Training the Department of Defense Workforce for Global Health Engagement to Support the Geographic Combatant Commands

The authors (1) analyze the elements of global health engagement (GHE) education and training (E&T), (2) develop and evaluate options for improving GHE E&T, and (3) present an integrated and sequenced set of E&T recommendations for the GHE community.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Commentary

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Commentary

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.