Research briefs

New research evaluates how floating devices that harness the energy of the oceans’ waves might be able to get power back online after hurricanes.

New research suggests that climate change makes it increasingly difficult for tree seedlings, which are vulnerable to hot and dry weather, to regenerate following wildfires in low-elevation forests, possibly contributing to abrupt forest loss. The results highlight how future fires in similar sites may catalyse transitions from forest to non-forest ecosystems.

After 2017’s record year of billion-dollar disaster events and additional hurricanes and fires in 2018, a new study reveals that inconsistent non-profit resources across different jurisdictions had impacted disaster recovery efforts, especially in areas that needed the most help. Despite inconsistencies, non-profits still provide essential support and funding.

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.

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.