Newswise — A Baylor University expert is available to comment to journalists about how people and communities respond to extreme weather related shocks like the recent deadly tornado outbreak in Missouri.
Dr. Sara Alexander, an applied social anthropologist at Baylor, has studied different households in several communities and examined how they adapted and coped with major climate events and shocks such as droughts, hurricanes and floods. The Baylor researcher also developed tools to measure each household's long-term resilience, an area that has not been extensively researched, and identified specific behaviors and strategies that allowed some families to "weather the storm" better than others.
‘Extreme weather events do not make people vulnerable, rather the event – be it a tornado, hurricane or tsunami – reveals the vulnerability individuals and communities have,” Alexander said about the recent tornado outbreak. “Coping strategies, used by victims in the immediate after effects of an event, usually focus on ensuring physical safety, meeting basic physiological needs, re-claiming any property that has not been completely destroyed, and beginning the process of re-gaining ‘normal living conditions’ as quickly as possible. Longer-term adjustments, or adaptive strategies, are not always made; in our society we are oriented to be more reactive to the event than proactive before the event occurs. However, our society has at its fingertips resources and institutions that can facilitate more effective preparation for these events. We must, however, decide it is important to take these events seriously before they happen. The increasing frequency and intensity of these events will most likely encourage people to become more proactive sooner rather than later.”
While climate change has been an emerging topic of interest to the world community, little scientific data exists on exactly how people respond to different climate-related "shocks" and events such as more intense hurricanes and prolonged drought.
In a recent study by Dr. Alexander that was published in the journal Climatic Change and Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change that looked at how vulnerable households in several coastal communities in Belize reacted to weather related shocks, the Baylor researcher found:
• Sixty-two percent of vulnerable households made the assertion that chronic weather-related threats such as floods and prolonged drought are a greater concern than "one-off" disasters like hurricanes.
• Perception about climate change and weather patterns played a key role in determining whether a household prepares adequately for a harsh weather event. For instance, 57 percent of households believed that storms today are more intense than they were five to 10 years ago, the household is more likely to prepare when weather forecasters predict threatening weather.
• Vulnerable and more secure households differ in coping strategies when dealing with weather-related events. Forty-nine percent of vulnerable households turn to their faith, 43 percent to their family, and 36 percent turned to their friends for emotional support. Only 19 percent turned to financially-based responses and only 8 percent made attempts to secure credit to gain resources to make repairs rebuild. Households that have the highest levels of security are more likely to use their savings or sell their assets to engage in a financially based response by repairing and rebuilding, many times finding emotional support through this work.
• A critical ingredient for reducing vulnerability and enhancing resilience is empowerment of marginalized groups and the associated access to resources.
• Although the capacity of households to adapt to harsh weather is a function of perception of risk and access to resources, resilience of communities depends on the ability of people to think and act collectively.
"The results suggest that both vulnerable and secure households respond to weather-related events, but they do so in different ways," said Alexander, associate professor and chair of the department of anthropology, forensic science and archaeology at Baylor's College of Arts and Sciences. “By definition, more vulnerable households are not able to respond as effectively to a natural disaster as those households whose livelihoods are more secure, that is, their capacity for response is influenced by their weakened ability to guard against risk.”
Alexander and her team developed a resilience-measuring index for human responses that examined certain long-term security indicators, including economic stability, human health conditions, adult education levels, social connectedness, environmental health, and food and nutrition security. The researchers then tracked those indicators as different weather-related events naturally occurred.
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