Reducing Risks from Climate Change and Natural Hazards
The impacts of human caused climate change already affect every place on the planet. Climate change exacerbates existing risks from natural hazards like floods, droughts, and heat waves, as well as contributing to sea level rise, species loss, and myriad other challenges at the intersection of people, the natural environment, and the built environment. Moreover, the risks of climate change and natural hazards are borne disproportionately by those who have done the least to create the problem and have the least resources to adapt. A sustainable and compassionate future depends on equitably mitigating long-term risks.
The CAREER project couples research-teaching-engagement. Teaching resources for instructors leading courses on long-term risk reduction are publicly available.
CCSC contributes to scholarship and engaged practice to reduce long-term risks through multiple projects.
CAREER: Integrated Modeling of Hazard Mitigation Stakeholder Networks for Compassionate, Sustainable Risk Reduction
Principal Investigator: Ward Lyles
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Period: 2018 - 2023
Project Summary:
This project develops, tests, and refines a new model which explicitly incorporates stakeholders' thoughts and emotions as factors that interact to enhance or constrain hazard mitigation decision-making. Contributions of the project include an improved process for more effective, sustainable hazard mitigation decision-making at the local level and expansion of a generation of hazard mitigation champions across multiple professional and academic disciplines. The integrated education and research program fosters dissemination of findings widely and cost-effectively, including to historically underrepresented populations.
Lyles and colleagues have published two articles related to this project:
Who Cares? Arnstein's Ladder, the Emotional Paradox of Public Engagement and (Re)Imagining Planning as Caring (2020 Best paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association
Caring as Class: Resolving the Emotional Paradox of Climate Change Education (Journal of Sustainability Education)
Community Engaged Local Climate Planning Project
As part of the NSF CAREER project, the CCSC has partnered with the Sustainability Offices of the City of Lawrence and Douglas County (KS) on an innovative equity-center climate planning process. Deep engagement with groups typically exclude (or unable to participate in) planning guides every step of the process. Doctoral candidate Kelly Overstreet, Ward Lyles, and multiple Master's students in Urban Planning have supported this project, including serving on the project steering committee. Overstreet's in-progress dissertation book project - Persistence in Planning: Process, Engagement, and Equity in Local Climate Planning - promises to offer novel and applicable insights into how a planning process that should have failed due to pandemic disruptions, staff turnover, governmental reorganization, and other factors has continued to progress without losing its central focus on equity. Also, a service learning course taught in partnership with the local Sustainability Director in Spring 2020 generated student projects exploring the possibilities of innovative community engagement practices.
Assessing the Influence of Hazard Mitigation Planning on Disaster Recovery
Principal Investigator: Ward Lyles
Co-Principal Investigator: Elaina J. Sutley
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Period: 2019 - 2022
Project Summary:
The research team, led by CCSC Director Ward Lyles and Associate Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineer Elaina Sutley, addresses an important gap in knowledge about how hazard mitigation and planning before a natural disaster affects recovery after a disaster and reduces long-term risk. We have collected data on post-disaster recovery decision-making, outputs such as planning documents, and outcomes like decisions to steer development out of locations known to be hazardous. The team is merge that data with existing data on hazard mitigation. Through this research, the team generates information relevant to policymakers and practitioners, extend the foundation of datasets needed for future data analysis, and strengthen the hazards research community.
Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program Phase III
Principal Investigator: Ward Lyles
Funding Agency: University of Oklahoma Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program
Period: 2018 - 2021
Project Summary:
CCSC Director Ward Lyles provided expertise and engage in research efforts around three tasks in the project, each based on a research question: How do emergency managers participate in a planning process that seeks to develop long-term hazard risk reduction? How do configurations of social networks and social capital evolve in response to disasters? How does information-seeking behavior differ between resource-constrained and resource-abundant jurisdictions, and how does that affect planning outcomes?
Lyles and colleagues have published two journal articles from this research, both of which inform not only scholarship but federal, state, and local policy and planning.