Volume 20, Issue 2

Factors associated with structural racism, disenfranchisement, poverty, and other persistent sources of inequity are associated with vulnerability and exposure to environmental hazards. Social, demographic, and environmental factors associated with vulnerability to environmental hazards have been used by many researchers to produce indexes of hazard vulnerability. In preparation for a climate change health risk assessment for Washington state, we compared methods and results from six indexes designed to support environmental health risk assessment. Production of these indexes varies in the number of variables considered, calculation complexity, and exposure of local causal pathways. Results for these indexes are generally very similar, especially at the highest decile of vulnerability, the exception being the Environmental Health Disparities index, the only one to consider hazard exposure. Some indexes used methods that hide causal pathways. Those that exposed causal pathways limited model structure. Results indicate that simpler indexes may be more appropriate for use in decision support tools as they require less overhead for data updates and scenario analysis and that other methodologies may provide a more useful framework for index generation.

Violent crime is on the rise in many American cities and the annual cost to police and the community increases proportionally. Violent crime scenes are similar to the calamity experienced with natural or human-made disasters. Understanding how it could have been prevented, what services were needed, and what remaining gaps still exist in services and resources is critical. The narrative can be shifted by treating violent crime like naturally occurring disasters and applying comprehensive emergency management strategies to prepare, mitigate, respond, and recover from this whole community hazard. This dynamic emergency management-based approach outlines coordination across key agencies and stakeholders, and has the potential to mitigate the impact of violent crime in major urban cities in the United States (US). Using the District of Columbia (DC) as a sample study area, this policy proposal is supported by a qualitative analyses of available data, including from the limited existing literature and from related DC agencies. Findings demonstrate how the DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (DCHSEMA), can coordinate response and hold agencies accountable within its current capacity while supporting the interoperability of all related violent crime agencies involved. These findings have both national and international implications.

Recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence bring promising new capabilities that can substantially improve our ability to manage complex and evolving situations in the face of uncertainty. Humanitarian crises exemplify such situations, and the pervasiveness of social media renders it one of the most abundant sources of real-time information available. However, it is quite a difficult task to condense a body of social media posts into useful information quickly. In this paper we consider the challenge of using social media reports to provide a reliable, real-time situational awareness in the management of humanitarian crises. Effectively addressing this challenge requires extracting only the relevant information out of text and images in individual social media posts, fusing this information together into actionable information points for decision makers, and providing an assessment of the trustworthiness of this information. We propose a general solution framework and discuss a system developed in collaboration with NATO which combines state-of-the-art deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and information fusion models to provide a reliable, actionable, real-time situational awareness for supporting decision making in humanitarian crisis logistics. In addition to the technical approach, we also discuss important practical aspects of this project including the development and validation process, challenges encountered along the way, and key lessons learned.

We present findings from our 2018 survey of organizations involved in emergency management in areas affected by Hurricanes Sandy and Isaac to gain insight into their social media use throughout the four phases of emergencies – preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation planning. While 90% of the 269 respondents report using social media in their communications with the public, government offices are more active throughout the four phases compared to the other groups. First responders use social media most during the response and preparedness phases, while news media and NGOs are more active during the recovery phase. This suggests that groups that perform emergency-response functions and NGOs play complementary roles in emergency communications. Further, respondents representing government offices and first responders use social media primarily to disseminate information, while news media groups and NGOs expressed more confidence in social media as a mechanism for bi-directional communications. While Facebook is most commonly used to respond to the public, the NGOs and news media groups also use newer, image-based options like Instagram. All groups reported less social media use during the quiet time (mitigation planning phase) between emergencies, suggesting opportunities for these organizations to increase communications with the public before emergencies arise.

The emergence of COVID-19 pandemic has had significant impacts on human lives as well as economic and social stability. The United States has a complicated history with biosecurity. The September 11th terror attacks uncovered various weaknesses in the national biosecurity infrastructure that have persisted into the current pandemic. This study explores the implications of framing the infectious disease biothreat as a security threat to improve our capabilities while protecting against the potential accelerated threat of bioterrorism in the post-COVID-19 era. To counter the increasing biothreats, the United States must invest in revamping the biodefense infrastructure to increase our resilience to various biothreats.

This article summarizes many critical infrastructure vulnerability issues involving connectivity to space platforms and cyber systems. The article emphasizes the importance of rigorous updated risk assessment in these aeas and the urgent need to exercise all phases and aspects of infrastructufe failure, collapse or extended disruption.