Future Learning Out Of Disaster Demographics (FLOODS)

With climate change, we face a future of shifting distributions of natural disasters with potentially unprecedented magnitude. Understanding how individuals and populations react to such high magnitude disaster and how aid and policy response can mitigate the negative effects while providing the most support is more important than ever. This project, collaborating with the University of Colorado Boulder, utilises high volume and archival datasets to explore how individuals, populations, and local and national government respond to unprecedented natural disasters of the past. Specifically, it explores how individuals redistribute, demographics change, and land use evolves. It also examines the intersection of these population dynamics with differing local, regional, and national policies and the ensuing development trajectory of settled areas. Further, we investigate how short-term relief and policy changes can have long-term implications for population composition and distributions as well as changing inequities of exposure to risk of natural hazards.

Jeremiah J. Nieves