Collaborative Research: Response and Resilience Following Compound Extreme Events

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Climate change impacts are becoming increasingly common, severe, and complex. Multiple climate disasters (droughts, floods, extreme heat) may occur simultaneously or in succession, and interact with non-climate factors (COVID-19 pandemic, land management legislation), compounding the overall impacts and leading to increased vulnerability of social-ecological systems. While the potential impact of compound disasters is recognized, little is known about how societies experiencing them respond and build resilience. Thus, this project aims to understand the response to and impact of compound disasters within pastoral systems. Such understanding is directly relevant to climate change adaptation and efforts to reduce disaster risk and build resilience in the face of compound disasters. In pursuing these aims, the project will train students, including at a minority serving institution, and more generally enhance the capacity for environmental science in undeserved scientific communities.This interdisciplinary project brings together senior and junior faculty, who have decades of experience working in pastoral contexts, to ask research questions focused on (1) the impacts of compound disasters on pastoral systems with different land management systems, (2) understanding objective and subjective resilience to compound disasters, and (3) the impacts on the social institutions that are critical to a society’s ability to respond, cope, and recover. Interviews, surveys, and participatory research approaches will provide the data needed to understand how responses of households and communities to one extreme event affects their ability to respond to subsequent or concurrent events. This study is unique in marshaling both objective and subjective measures of resilience in understanding the capacity of both individuals and societies to respond to compound disasters, thereby transforming the growing interdisciplinary study of resilience of those most affected by natural hazards.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.