Chris Emrich

University of Central Florida | UCF · School of Public Administration

Wildfire is increasing in frequency, extent, and severity in many parts of the USA. Considering the unequal burden of natural hazards on socially vulnerable populations, we ask here, how are characteristics of social vulnerability associated with wildfire occurrence nationwide, at different scales and across differing levels of wildland–urban inter...

Wildfires can be devastating for social and ecological systems, but the recovery period after wildfire presents opportunities to reduce future risk through adaptation. We use a collective case study approach to systematically compare social and ecological recovery following four major fire events in Australia and the United States: the 1998 wildfir...

Natural hazards such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires cause devastating socio-economic impacts on communities. In South Florida, most of these hazards are becoming increasingly frequent and severe because of the warming climate, and changes in vulnerability and exposure, resulting in significant damage to infrastructure, homes, and businesses....

Natural hazards such as floods, hurricanes, heatwaves, and wildfires cause significant economic losses (e.g., agricultural and property damage) as well as a high number of fatalities. Natural hazards are often driven by univariate or multivariate hydrometeorological drivers. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how and which hydrometeorological v...

An ongoing debate in academic and practitioner communities, centers on the measurement similarities and differences between social vulnerability and community resilience. More specifically, many see social vulnerability and community resilience measurements as conceptually and empirically the same. Only through a critical and comparative assessment...

Social vulnerability is significant in differential disaster impacts and outcomes and has been shown to influence the pace and progression of post-disaster recovery processes. Various disaster assistance programs - designed to support individual survivors, states, local governments, non-governmental entities, and businesses - may be distributing fu...

The US is exposed to myriad natural hazards causing USD billions in damages and thousands of fatalities each year. Significant population and economic growth during the last several decades have resulted in more people residing in hazardous places. However, consistent national-scale hazard threat assessment techniques reflecting the state of hazard...

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...

Socially vulnerable communities experience disproportionately negative outcomes following natural disasters and underscoring a need for well-validated measures to identify those at risk. However, questions have surfaced regarding the factor structure, internal consistency, and generalizability of social vulnerability measures. A reliance on data-dr...

Purpose: To assess veteran-specific prostate cancer (PrCA) mortality-to-incidence ratios (MIR) in South Carolina's (SC) veteran population. Methods: U.S. Veterans Health Administration electronic medical records from January 1999 to December 2015 identified 3,073 PrCA patients residing in 345 ZIP code tabulation areas (ZCTA) within SC. MIRs were...

Human exposure to floods continues to increase, driven by changes in hydrology and land use. Adverse impacts amplify for socially vulnerable populations, who disproportionately inhabit flood-prone areas. This study explores the geography of flood exposure and social vulnerability in the conterminous United States based on spatial analysis of fluvia...

Background Individuals affected by disasters are at risk for adverse mental health sequelae. Individuals living in the US Gulf Coast have experienced many recent major disasters, but few studies have explored the cumulative burden of experiencing multiple disasters on mental health. Objective The objective of this study was to evaluate the relatio...

Background This study aims to explore the relationship between social vulnerability (SoVI)indicators (race/ethnicity, population structure, socioeconomic status, housing structure, and access/functional needs) with low birth weight (LBW) and preterm delivery (PTD) rates across the Southeastern United States. Methods Annual low birth weight and pre...

The occurrence of elevated temperatures within landfills is a challenging issue for landfill operators to detect and correct. Little is known regarding the causes of elevated temperatures (ETs) or the number of landfills currently operating under such conditions. Therefore, the goal of this research was to determine which landfills within Florida h...

Social Sensing and Big Data Computing for Disaster Management captures recent advancements in leveraging social sensing and big data computing for supporting disaster management. Specifically, analysed within this book are some of the promises and pitfalls of social sensing data for disaster relevant information extraction, impact area assessment,...

After a disaster, there is an urgent need for information on population mobility. Our analysis examines the suitability of Twitter data for measuring post-disaster population mobility using the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Among Twitter users living in Puerto Rico, we show how many were displaced, the timing and destination of their disp...

Building disaster resilience is a stated goal of disaster risk reduction programs. Recent research emphasizes a need for a greater understanding of community disaster response and recovery capacity so that communities can absorb shocks and withstand severe conditions and progress through the recovery period more efficiently. Nepal, which is prone t...

Background Racial and socio-economic status (SES) disparities exist in prostate cancer (PrCA) incidence and mortality. Less is known regarding how geographical factors, including neighborhood social vulnerability and distance traveled to receive care, affect PrCA risk. The purpose of this research was to use the Veterans Administration Medical Syst...

The Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) includes multiple socioeconomic and demographic indicators related to the risk of obesity. However, it is uncertain how the SoVI input variables empirically affect the individual-level risk of obesity or the mechanisms contributing to the condition via the contextual built environment. This study examines the i...

This study investigates evacuation behaviors associated with Hurricane Matthew in October of 2016. It assesses factors influencing evacuation decisions and evacuation departure times for Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina from an online survey of respondents. Approximately 62% of the Florida sample, 77% of the Georgia sample, and 67% of the South...

Deconstructing causal linkages between place attributes and disaster outcomes at coarse scales like zip codes and counties is difficult because heterogeneous socio-economic characteristics operating at finer scales are masked. However, capturing detailed disaster outcomes about individuals and households for large areas can be equally complicated....

Traditional data collection methods such as remote sensing and field surveying often fail to offer timely information during or immediately following disaster events. Social sensing enables all citizens to become part of a large sensor network, which is low cost, more comprehensive, and always broadcasting situational awareness information. However...

Recent decades have witnessed an escalation in the social, economic, and ecological impacts of wildfires worldwide. Wildfire losses stem from the complex interplay of social and ecological forces at multiple scales, including global climate change, regional wildfire regimes altered by human activities, and locally managed wildland-urban interface (...

To date, there has been limited research conducted on disaster aid allocation across multiple regions and disasters within the United States. In addition, there is a paucity of research specifically connecting social indicators of vulnerability to public assistance grants aimed at restoring, rebuilding, and mitigating against future damages in disa...

Social vulnerability models are becoming increasingly important for hazard mitigation and recovery planning, but it remains unclear how well they explain disaster outcomes. Most studies using indicators and indexes employ them to either describe vulnerability patterns or compare newly devised measures to existing ones. The focus of this article is...

There are many index-based approaches for assessing vulnerability to socio-natural hazards with differences in underlying theory, indicator selection and aggregation methodology. Spatially explicit output scores depend on these characteristics and contrasting approaches can therefore lead to very different policy implications. These discrepancies c...

This paper traces the historic development of flood risk and the antecedent conditions that contributed to the catastrophic consequences in central South Carolina as the result of the 2015 flash flood. The study draws on archival and contextual research to underscore development paradoxes: the safe development paradox—federal policies aimed at maki...

Open Call for Submissions: Special Issue on “Social Sensing and Big Data Computing for Disaster Management” in International Journal of Digital Earth(IJDE) http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/est/ijde/si-5 http://tandf.msgfocus.com/q/1bw0nuBat178OTeYuSm/wv

Rapid flood mapping is critical for local authorities and emergency responders to identify areas in need of immediate attention. However, traditional data collection practices such as remote sensing and field surveying often fail to offer timely information during or right after a flooding event. Social media such as Twitter have emerged as a new d...

Purpose of the Study We define, map, and analyze geodemographic patterns of socially and medically vulnerable older adults within the tri-county region of South Florida. Design and Methods We apply principal components analysis (PCA) to a set of previously identified indicators of social and medical vulnerability at the census tract level. We crea...

The concept of disaster resilience has gained attention in political spheres and news outlets over the past few years, yet relatively few empirical measures of the concept exist. Furthermore, research into urban resilience has dwarfed our understanding of disaster resilience in rural places. This schism in what is known about the differences betwee...

Although social vulnerability has recently gained attention in academic studies, Brazil lacks frameworks and indicators to assess it for the entire country. Social vulnerability highlights differences in the human capacity to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. It varies over space and time, and among and between social groups, lar...

We examined environmental cancer risk disparities in Metropolitan Charleston by determining the variability in cancer risk and outcomes geographically by racial and socioeconomic characteristics. We mapped total cancer risk from the 2005 National-Scale Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) and five-year (2006-2010) cancer outcomes (incidence and mortality)...

This paper provides an overview of the loss data landscape in the United States. It outlines the various organizational efforts for collecting and disseminating loss data. Numerous governmental organizations collect loss estimates but there is not a single governmental entity that consolidates and disseminates this information in a standardized and...

Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) was applied to Greater Lisbon (Portugal). Based on the concepts used for the SoVI assessments in the US, 46 variables representing social vulnerability of the 149 civil parishes of Greater Lisbon were chosen. Thirty-eight variables were selected after application of correlation tests. They were standardized, and a...

Social vulnerability emphasizes the different burdens of disaster losses within and between places. Although China continuously experiences devastating natural disasters, there is a paucity of research specifically addressing the multidimensional nature of social vulnerability. This article presents an initial study on the social vulnerability of t...

There is increasing policy and research interest in disaster resilience, yet the extant literature is still mired in definitional debates, epistemological orientations of researchers, and differences in basic approaches to measurement. As a consequence, there is little integration across domains and disciplines on community resilience assessment, i...

Hurricane Sandy's 80 mph wind speeds did not achieve major hurricane status on the Saffir-Simpson scale, yet the storm had extreme consequences for the New York metropolitan area. Post-event recovery has been quite variable across the region, especially in New Jersey. This paper examines the progression of recovery at two time intervals — 6 months...

While flood risk management planning in the United States has focused on flood control structures designed to protect the economic value of property, it has consistently undervalued other social impacts associated with flooding. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) recently initiated research aimed at understanding how to incorporate social chara...

Continued population growth and development in exposed areas across Coastal Louisiana has created a new geography of hazards and disasters within the coastal zone. Increasing storm frequencies coupled with sea level rise will undoubtedly intensify the intersection between flood hazards and coastal residents. Accordingly, the baseline (inherent) cap...

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This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SREX) explores the challenge of understanding and managing the risks of climate extremes to advance climate change adaptation. Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. Changes in the frequency and...

Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 with devastating consequences. Almost all analyses of the disaster have been dedicated to the way the hurricane affected New Orleans. This volume examines the impact of Katrina on southern Mississippi. While communities along Mississippi's Gulf Coast shared the impact, their socioeconomic...

In the United States, direct losses from natural hazards are on the rise with hurricanes, flooding, and severe storms contributing about three quarters of the total damages. While losses from severe storms have been stable over the past fifty years, hurricane and flood losses have tripled. Per capita losses are also increasing showing that impacts...

The Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 formally establishes a national program for pre‐disaster mitigation. As part of the mitigation planning effort, state and local governments are required to perform assessments of hazards vulnerability, including the development of multi‐hazard maps. However, the number of communities possessing the technology, ex...

The southern United States is no stranger to hazard and disaster events. Intense hurricanes, drought, flooding, and other climate-sensitive hazards are commonplace and have outnumbered similar events in other areas of the United States annually in both scale and magnitude by a ratio of almost 4:1 during the past 10 years. While losses from climate-...

Between 1960 and 2008 the hazards associated with climate change, namely drought, flooding, more intense hurricanes, and sea-level rise caused more than $321 Billion in damage to the United States. Losses from these events are likely to increase in the coming years/decades unless something is done to mitigate their devastating impacts. This researc...

The historical disparities in the socio-demographic structure of New Orleans shaped the social vulnerability of local residents and their responses to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. These disparities, derived from race, class, gender, and age differences, have resulted in the uneven impact of the catastrophe on various communities in New Orle...

There is considerable federal interest in disaster resilience as a mechanism for mitigating the impacts to local communities, yet the identification of metrics and standards for measuring resilience remain a challenge. This paper provides a methodology and a set of indicators for measuring baseline characteristics of communities that foster resilie...

The pace of disaster recovery varies considerably from one place to another. Even when places suffer impacts from the same event, recovery studies often lack the spatial and temporal resolution to fully understand such local variability in the recovery process and patterns. This paper discusses the novel use of building permits and a spatial scan s...

Condensed summary: A comprehensive national loss inventory of natural hazards is the cornerstone for effective hazard and disaster mitigation. Despite federally demanded mitigation plans (Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, DMA 2000) that are supposed to accurately represent the risks and losses, there still is no systematic and centralized inventory...

Die Grundlegende Aufgabe beim strategischen Multi-Channel-Marketing-Management eines Unternehmens ist darin zu sehen, „ ...durch die intelligente und integrierte nutzung der Kommunikationskanäle und deren Integration eine effiziente und gleichzeitig qualitativ hochwertige Kundenkommunikation [zu] Erreichen, ...die sich über die drei Phasen Informat...

As cities continue to increase in size, population diversity, and complexity their vulnerability to future disasters will increase as well. This paper explores the variability in vulnerability to natural hazards among the 132 urban areas using three indices of vulnerability: social, built environment, and hazard impact. The paper then examines the...

The social vulnerability of the American population is not evenly distributed among social groups or between places. Some regions may be more susceptible to the impacts of hazards than other places based on the characteristics of the people residing within them. As we saw with Hurricane Katrina, when coupled with residencies in high-risk areas such...

The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the most active season on record and produced 3 category five storms, namely Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Wilma. The article explores the impact these storms had on the Gulf Coast of the USA. It highlights the effect that Hurricane Katrina had on the structure of New Orleans and also on the...

More than 35 major Presidential disaster declarations, including those for hurricanes Katrina and Rita, already have been declared across the United States in 2005. This is a harbinger of another costly year for natural disasters. While losses from the 2004 hurricane season are still being tallied, estimates suggest that each Florida hurricane last...

This article examines the vulnerability of US coastal counties to erosion by combining a socioeconomic vulnerability index with the US Geological Survey's physically based coastal vulnerability index. The end product is a county-based index of overall coastal place vulnerability. The results indicate that place vulnerability along the coast is high...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of South Carolina, 2005. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 156-168).