Winter Storm Uri: A Test of Texas’ Water Infrastructure and Water Resource Resilience to Extreme Winter Weather Events

We synthesize the interconnected impacts of Texas’ water and energy resources and infrastructure including the cascading effects due to Winter Storm Uri. The government’s preparedness, communication, policies, and response as well as storm impacts on vulnerable communities are evaluated using available information and data. Where knowledge gaps exist, we propose potential research to elucidate health, environmental, policy, and economic impacts of the extreme weather event. We expect that recommendations made here — while specific to the situation and outcomes of Winter Storm Uri — will increase Texas’ resilience to other extreme weather events not discussed in this paper. We found that out of 14 million residents who were on boil water notices, those who were served by very small water systems went, on average, a minimum of three days longer without potable water. Available county-level data do not indicate vulnerable communities went longer periods of time without power or water during the event. More resolved data are required to understand who was most heavily impacted at the community or neighborhood level. Gaps in government communication, response, and policy are discussed, including issues with identifying — and securing power to — critical infrastructure and the fact that the state’s Emergency Alert System was not used consistently to update Texans during the crisis. Finally, research recommendations are made to bolster weaknesses discovered during and after the storm including (1) reliable communication strategies, (2) reducing disproportionate impacts to vulnerable communities, (3) human health impacts, (4) increasing water infrastructure resilience, and (5) how climate change could impact infrastructure resilience into the future.

Sensitivity of Rainfall to Cumulus Parameterization Schemes from a WRF Model over the City of Douala in Cameroon

With the recurrence of extreme weather events in Central Africa, it becomes imperative to provide high-resolution forecasts for better decision-making by the Early warning systems. This study assesses the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to simulate heavy rainfall that affected the city of Douala in Cameroon during 19–21 August 2020. The WRF model is configured with two domains with horizontal resolutions of 15 and 5[Formula: see text]km, 33 vertical levels using eight cumulus parameterization schemes (CPSs). The WRF model performance is assessed by investigating the agreement between simulations and observations. Categorical and deterministic statistics are used, which include the probability of detection (POD), the success ratio (SR), the equitable threat score (ETS), the pattern correlation coefficient (PCC), the root mean square error (RMSE), the mean absolute error (MAE), and the BIAS. K-index is finally used to assess the capacity of the WRF model to predict the instability of the atmosphere in Douala during the above-mentioned period. It is found that (1) The POD, SR and ETS decrease when the threshold increases, showing the difficulty of the WRF model to predict and locate heavy rainfall events; (2) There are important differences in the rainfall area simulated by the eight CPSs; (3) The BIAS is negative for the eight CPSs, implying that all of the CPSs tested underestimate the rainfall over the study area; (4) Some of the CPSs have good agreement with observations, especially the new modifed Tiedtke and the Betts–Miller–Janjic schemes; (5) The K-index, an atmospheric instability index, is well predicted by the eight CPSs tested in this work. Overall, the WRF model exhibits a strong ability for rainfall simulation in the study area. The results point out that heavy rainfall events in tropical areas are very sensitive to CPSs and study domain. Therefore, sensitivity tests studies should be multiplied in order to identify most suitable CPSs for a given area.

A System for Resilience Learning: Developing a Community-Driven, Multi-Sector Research Approach for Greater Preparedness and Resilience to Long-Term Climate Stressors and Extreme Events in the Miami Metropolitan Region

There is a growing need for integrated approaches that align community priorities with strategies that build resilience to climate hazards, societal shocks, and economic crises to ensure more equitable and sustainable outcomes. We anticipate that adaptive management and resilience learning are central elements for these approaches. In this paper, we describe an approach to build and test a Resilience Learning System to support research and implementation of a resilience strategy developed for the Greater Miami and the Beaches or the Resilient305 Strategy. Elements foundational to the design of this integrated research strategy and replicable Resilience Learning System are: (1) strong partnerships among community members, government and non-government organization leaders, and researchers from multiple academic institutions; (2) contributions of subject matter expertise and local knowledge to identify information and translational gaps, formulate metrics and evaluate outcomes of Resilient305 Strategy actions from the community perspective; and (3) a comprehensive understanding of civic engagement activities, technological tools, and resilience-building capacities, including policy and financial innovations, from which to advance socio-technological, smart and connected regional-to-hyperlocal community translation through co-design/co-production. Initial results on co-produced metrics are provided. This work produces a new, replicable framework for resilience research that includes a comprehensive set of metrics, translation to communities through structured dialogues, a collaborative process involving all stakeholders and researchers, and evaluation of resilience actions to inform new investments and improve understanding and effectiveness over time.

COVID-19 as an Extreme Event in the New York Metropolitan Region

During early 2020, the world encountered an extreme event in the form of a new and deadly disease, COVID-19. Over the next two years, the pandemic brought sickness and death to countries and their cities around the globe. One of the first and initially the hardest hit location was New York City, USA. This article is an introduction to the Special Issue in this journal that highlights the impacts from and responses to COVID-19 as an extreme event in the New York City metropolitan region. We overview the aspects of COVID-19 that make it an important global extreme event, provide brief background to the conditions in the world, and the US before describing the 10 articles in the issue that focus on conditions, events and dynamics in New York City during the initial phases of the pandemic.

A Quest for the Origin of the Uneven Spread of Covid-19 Cases

For more than one and a half years now, the world is highly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Covid-19 cases are, however, not evenly distributed across the countries; a few countries, particularly high-income countries have been hit harder than the countries of weak economic condition. The reasons for such an asymmetrical distribution are not clearly understood yet. In this work, we have examined the unevenness of global distribution of Covid-19 incidences till 18th June 2021 in terms of the economic condition of countries. Subsequently, we have tried to identify the main underlying factors behind unequal Covid-19 cases. Our analysis suggests that the physical connectivity and the diffusion of coronavirus are the main causes of the different unequal spread of Covid-19 cases in different countries. We find that the Covid-19 infected and death cases are well described by a power law in terms of the stated parameters.

Compounding Risks Caused by Heat Exposure and COVID-19 in New York City: A Review of Policies, Tools, and Pilot Survey Results

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic changed many social, economic, environmental, and healthcare determinants of health in New York City (NYC) and worldwide. COVID-19 potentially heightened the risk of heat-related health impacts in NYC, particularly on the most vulnerable communities, who often lack equitable access to adequate cooling mechanisms such as air conditioning (AC) and good quality green space. Here, we review some of the policies and tools which have been developed to reduce vulnerability to heat in NYC. We then present results from an online pilot survey of members of the environmental justice organization WE ACT for Environmental Justice (WE ACT) between July 11 and August 8, 2020, which asked questions to evaluate how those in Northern Manhattan coped with elevated summer heat in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also make some policy recommendations based on our initial findings. Results of our pilot survey suggest that people stayed indoors more due to COVID-19 and relied more on AC units to stay cool. Survey responses also indicated that some avoided visiting green spaces due to concerns around overcrowding and did not regularly frequent them due to the distance from their homes. The responses also demonstrate a potential racial disparity in AC access; AC ownership and access was highest amongst white and lowest amongst Latino/a/x and Black respondents. The impacts of COVID-19 have highlighted the need to accelerate efforts to improve preparedness for extreme heat like the City of New York’s AC and cooling center programs, heat ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) retrofitting, equitable green space expansion, and stronger environmental justice community networks and feedback mechanisms to hear from affected residents. Conducting a survey of this kind annually may provide an additional effective component of evaluating cooling initiatives in NYC.

Towards Disentangling Lockdown-Driven Air Quality Changes in the Northeastern U.S.

In the absence of preventive therapies or effective treatment for most cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), governments worldwide have sought to minimize person-to-person severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission through a variety of lock-down measures and social distancing policies. Extreme events like the COVID-19 pandemic present a tremendous opportunity to make quantitative connections between changes in anthropogenic forcing, social and economic activity, and the related Earth system response. In this paper, we examine the air quality impacts associated with the pandemic response measures in the Northeastern United States.

Life in Anticipation of the COVID-19 Pandemic ‘Peak’: Reflecting on ‘Strategies’ for and Variations in attempts at ‘Flattening the Curve’ and Managing the Crisis

On March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the emerging COVID-19 threat a pandemic following the global spread of the virus. As countries around the world implemented emergency measures in a concerted effort to handle the emerging pandemic, the nature and implications of the different kinds of precautionary measures adopted have remained contested. The majority of countries opted for efforts to slow the rate of infection, whilst critics have argued for stricter and milder measures, respectively. The living experience of the pandemic is inherently temporal as it is shaped by sentiments of living in anticipation of the envisioned pandemic peak(s) and aftermath, as vividly illustrated with references to the need for ‘flattening the curve’ so as to reduce the impact of the looming or creeping crisis. This paper sets out to critically discuss the notion of pandemic ‘strategies’, recognizing also that governments altered their strategic stances throughout the initial phase of the pandemic. It is likely that the aftermath of the crisis will trigger discussions of what kind of response should be considered as best practice. Thus, greater attention to the notion of ‘strategies’ in light of the COVID-19 pandemic is in order.

COVID-19 in Three Global Cities: Comparing Impacts and Outcomes

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has impacted cities around the world. Global cities theory suggests that cities articulated to the global economy should be affected by such flows similarly. We start from this perspective and examine the impacts and outcomes of COVID-19 in three global cities: New York City, London and Tokyo. Our results focus on the speed, intensity, scale and characteristics of COVID-19 related cases and deaths in these cities and their respective countries. We find that while there are similarities between the experiences of global cities, there are also significant differences. The differences can be partially explained by policy, socio-economic and cultural differences. Our findings suggest that cities articulated to the global system could benefit from developing their own locally unique early warning and emergency response system, integrated with but separate from national systems.