Flood Recovery Outcomes and Disaster Assistance Barriers for Vulnerable Populations

Disaster recovery spending for major flood events in the United States is at an all-time high. Yet research examining equity in disaster assistance increasingly shows that recovery funding underserves vulnerable populations. Based on a review of academic and grey literature, this article synthesizes empirical knowledge of population disparities in access to flood disaster assistance and outcomes during disaster recovery. The results identify renters, low-income households, and racial and ethnic minorities as populations that most face barriers accessing federal assistance and experience adverse recovery outcomes. The analysis explores the drivers of these inequities and concludes with a focus on the performance of disaster programs in addressing unmet needs, recognition of intersectional social vulnerabilities in recovery analysis, and gaps in data availability and transparency.

PROGRAM PEMBENTUKAN DAN PEMBEKALAN TIM TANGGAP BENCANA BERBASIS ONLINE

Natural disasters are one of the natural phenomena that can threaten human lives which could cause material and immaterial losses. According to Antara. News, the National Disaster Management Authority or Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Bencana (BNPB) has registered 372 natural disasters in Indonesia since the beginning of 2021. Airlangga University School of Medicine has a Natural Disaster Assistance Unit that provides volunteers and a variety of facilities as needed, but the competence of human resources is still lacking. The lack of specific roles and skills of volunteers to support disaster victims can be a problem. Faced with these issues, FK Unair's Anesthesiology and Resuscitation Community Services Team has formed a disaster response team consisting of people of different life and educational backgrounds from different locations to conduct a disaster management training program to update the latest knowledge.Keywords: Disaster Response Team, Training, Online, Disaster Risk ReductionAbstrakBencana alam merupakan salah satu fenomena alam yang dapat mengancam keberlangsungan hidup manusia dan dapat menimbulkan kerugian materi maupun non materi. Berdasarkan Antara. News, Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Bencana (BNPB) mencatat 372 kejadian bencana alam di wilayah Indonesia sejak awal tahun 2021. Fakultas Kedokteran Universitas Airlangga memiliki Unit Bantuan Bencana Alam yang memiliki relawan dan berbagai sarana yang siap berangkat kapanpun dibutuhkan namun kesiapan sumber daya manusia dinilai masih kurang. Masih kurangnya spesifik tugas dan kompetensi relawan yang berangkat membantu korban bencana dapat menjadi permasalahan. Dengan adanya permasalahan tersebut, Tim Pengabdian masyarakat Departemen Anestesiologi dan Reanimasi FK Unair bermaksud untuk membentuk tim tanggap bencana yang direkrut dari berbagai tempat dan dari berbagai kalangan serta berbagai latar belakang pendidikan yang akan dilakukan pelatihan tanggap bencana untuk update ilmu dan materi baru yang terkini.Kata Kunci: Tim Tanggap Bencana, Pembekalan, Online, Disaster Risk Reduction

An Intelligent System for the Enhancement of Visually Impaired Navigation and Disaster Assistance using Geo-Based Positioning and Machine Learning

Technological advancement has brought the masses unprecedented convenience, but unnoticed by many, a population neglected through the age of technology has been the visually impaired population. The visually impaired population has grown through ages with as much desire as everyone else to adventure but lack the confidence and support to do so. Time has transported society to a new phase condensed in big data, but to the visually impaired population, this quick-pace living lifestyle, along with the unpredictable nature of natural disaster and COVID-19 pandemic, has dropped them deeper into a feeling of disconnection from the society. Our application uses the global positioning system to support the visually impaired in independent navigation, alerts them in face of natural disasters, and reminds them to sanitize their devices during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Estimated Economic Impacts of the 2019 Midwest Floods

In the spring of 2019, U.S. agriculture experienced a record high number of prevented planted acres primarily due to historic rainfall across large portions of the Corn Belt and Mid-South. Producers of corn, upland cotton, soybean, and wheat were impacted with a substantial loss of revenue due to no crops being produced and marketed. With about 11.4 million acres of corn not planted, foregone gross revenue from crop sales likely exceeded $6 billion alone. Instead of focusing on the loss of producers’ incomes as a result of prevented planted acres, our analysis focuses on the economic impacts, due to lost sales, for firms that provide inputs to farmers. Acres prevented from planting resulted in producers not incurring typical expenditures for planting and post planting inputs such as seed, crop nutrients, and crop protection (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, etc.). Agricultural input manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers do not have similar opportunities to insure against foregone sales and have received no disaster assistance payments. Normally, the large geographic footprint of many of these firms mitigates the impact of localized weather effects. However, given the widespread nature of the wet spring, these firms were negatively affected across Corn Belt and Mid-South representing a substantial production area. Regional economic impact of declines in sales by agricultural input providers due to wet weather-based prevented plantings on 13.1 million acres. Direct sale losses of $2.9 billion led to $4.5 billion losses in total sales that were concentrated in parts of Minnesota, South Dakota, and Illinois.

The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality, and Perceptions of Government Assistance

This chapter addresses a central research question of the politics of climate disaster: Who do citizens believe responsible for aftermath relief? The authors examine the issue of responsibility attribution in federal disaster assistance—and the related question of who voters believe deserves government disaster relief—against three devastating 2017 hurricanes, with a special focus on the impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico. The authors begin to answer the questions of responsibility and deservingness with survey data collected by them in a pilot study on the Island of Puerto Rico in 2019. They conclude by identifying fruitful links of comparative analysis between climate disaster politics and distributive and welfare politics.

To Rebuild or Relocate? Long-Term Mobility Decisions of Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) Recipients

Limited funds and the demand for disaster assistance call for a broader understanding of how homeowners decide to either rebuild or relocate from their disaster-affected homes. This study examines the long-term mobility decisions of homeowners in Lumberton, North Carolina, USA, who received federal assistance from the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) for property acquisition, elevation, or reconstruction following Hurricane Matthew in 2016. The authors situate homeowners’ decisions to rebuild or relocate in the context of property attributes and neighborhood characteristics. Logit and probit regressions reveal that homeowners with lower-value properties are less likely to relocate, and those subjected to higher flood and inundation risks are more likely to relocate. Additionally, homeowners in neighborhoods of higher social vulnerability—those with a higher proportion of minorities and mortgaged properties—are more likely to rebuild their disaster-affected homes. The authors discuss homeowners’ mobility decisions in the context of the social vulnerability of neighborhoods. Our results contribute to an ongoing policy discussion that seeks to articulate the housing and neighborhood attributes that affect the long-term mobility decisions of recipients of HMGP assistance. The authors suggest that local governments prioritize the mitigation of properties of homeowners of higher physical and social vulnerability to reduce socioeconomic disparities in hazard mitigation and build equitable community resilience.

A Replication of “Weathering Corruption” ( Journal of Law and Economics, 2008)

Previous research using data on convictions for corruption-related crimes from the Public Integrity Section (PIN) of the Department of Justice points to a positive correlation between the amount of corruption in a state and the amount of federal funds provided to the state for natural disaster relief. We take a closer look at the relationship between public corruption and disaster assistance and find little support for the hypothesis that the provision of federal disaster aid increases public corruption. Our analysis suggests instead that prior evidence of such a link arises from an unexplained correlation during the 1990s between disaster aid and convictions of postal employees for crimes such as stealing mail. Convictions for postal service crimes appear to account for a large fraction of the total federal convictions reported by PIN, which could have far-reaching implications, given that the PIN data have been used so extensively in the corruption literature.

Resilience to shocks in Malawian households

Building up resilience in agricultural households has assumed a critical role in development strategies in recent years because, it is argued, the costs of strengthening resilience are less than the recurring expenditure for disaster assistance. Relying on large household datasets from 2010 and 2013, we explored the resilience of Malawian households to the exogenous shocks of flooding and currency devaluation during this period. We utilised two strategies for understanding resilience. The first, a classification framework pioneered by Briguglio and others, categorises households into resilience and vulnerability spaces. The second approach employs econometric analysis to explore food security resilience. These two complementary analyses reveal that infrastructure, assets, education and non-agricultural employment opportunities contribute most to food security resilience.