On the Use of Synthetic Populations to Assess Health Risks of Complex Disasters

The pathways from climate change and related disasters to health outcomes can be conceptualized as direct (primary) or indirect (secondary or tertiary). How these pathways impact the health of a given population are the result of complex interactions between climate-induced forcing functions, non-climatic environmental risk factors, community socio-economic structures and processes, and the health attitudes and behaviors of individuals and groups. These interactions vary by place and over time to create a complex mosaic of health risks. To address the complexity of the consequences of climate change across space and time, planning and policy approaches have typically used post-hoc analyses and have extrapolated relationships temporally without the ability in most instances to account for new contextual conditions at a place.The focus of this handbook chapter is to describe and illustrate how agent-based modeling of synthetic populations could be used to create reasonable scenarios of current and future health risks associated with climate change and related disasters. As an example of the utility of the platform, the chapter provides an estimate of extreme heat exposures of individuals in one region of the United States. Additionally, it gives examples of further applications of synthetic population modeling for assessing health risks following an acute natural disaster, such as a hurricane or earthquake.

Whose Past Counts? Collective Remembrances

Disasters and subsequent recovery efforts are guided by a number of community considerations. Least understood of these are the communities’ collective memories of past disasters and their efforts to recover. This chapter argues that disasters shape the collective memory of communities and these collective memories persist over generations, thus becoming part of a community’s gestalt. The chapter develops the concept of collective memory as it applies to disasters as a framework for examining two very different cases—the earthquake of 1775 in Lisbon and the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70 ce. Although these were disasters of very different forms, they were of such importance that they continue to be part of the collective consciousness of residents in both cities. The cases also illuminate four important issues that are critical to understanding disaster recovery: resistance/resilience; religion/naturalism; memorials/remembrances; and authoritarian/collective responses.

Disaster Resilience Policy through the Lens of Culture and Values

With the transition from a descriptive construct to a normative concept, resilience has engendered debate as to its appropriateness and effectiveness as a community planning strategy in addressing existing and future threats. In some measure the questions raised are because the role of cultural values in resilience construction has not been fully explored. As communities, cities, and regions strive to enhance resilience, a greater understanding of the importance of cultural values is required. The authors adopt two metaphors are useful in describing how resilience is construction. They use the metaphors to construct a heuristic that incorporates cultural values in resilience construction in a very transparent manner. The heuristic draws upon the theoretical work in cultural values by Mary Douglas, the enhancement of that work by Kahan and others, and by integrating the two into recent work in resilience on assemblage theory.