Many rural Tongan women are tackling the various challenges wrought by this year's Cyclone Gita - one of the worst storms to pass Tonga in 60 years - with hard work and leadership. With the help of UN Women, they are responding to the needs of the community, self-mobilizing and connecting with the private sector to secure resources.
United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN WOMEN)
New research finds that damage caused by natural disasters and recovery efforts launched in their aftermaths have increased wealth inequality between races in the United States.
Buddhist pagodas are identified as sites of community organization and information dissemination, and would likely serve as important sites for seeking assistance during a major crisis or information dissemination about natural disaster preparedness. These religious institutions could also function as a refuge during or after disasters since they harbour donations.
Certain housing types and housing markets in coastal communities are often overlooked in the disaster recovery process because American housing recovery policy focuses on single-family, owner-occupied housing and neglects single and multi-family rental housing. In turn, coastal vacation homes contend with limited resources for recovery.
Biased disaster mitigation leads to unequal disaster impacts and differential recovery rates in cross-sections of communities. These problems are solvable using an approach that improves biased disaster mitigation by investing in better infrastructure in socially vulnerable neighborhoods and updating recovery policy to not overlook vulnerable households.
According to several reviews, flood protection infrastructure alone does not mitigate flood risk. Unquestioning faith in it can actually deter risk reduction by causing governments to allocate large sums of recovery funding to construct more protective infrastructure without asking why there was failure in the first place.
Institute for Social and Environmental Transition - International (ISET)
A new study finds that disasters attributed to other community members — like contagious epidemics — weakened cooperation, increased distrust and led to a long-term reduction in organization building. By contrast, disasters attributed to an act of nature evoked a sense of shared fate that fostered cooperation.
A recent study warns that a failure to properly account for all the deaths related to the 2017 storm and the possible dismantling of the territory's data collection services might affect the island's current chance of recovery, as well as its ability to respond to future emergencies.
While cities around the world are facing increased exposure to weather-related risks and hazards, a new study found that most of the coastal communities in the U.S. do not have an overarching strategy for building urban disaster resilience and lack coordination between multiple urban systems, including land use activities, natural environments and public infrastructure investments, particularly in Texas.
In 2004, a tsunami devastated much of the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh. Research found that reconstruction in the coastal zone has unintentionally exacerbated this segregation: now many lower-income newcomers rent rebuilt houses that higher-income tsunami survivors do not wish to occupy.
