Publications by authors named "Benjamin Rachunok"

Building community resilience in the face of climate disasters is critical to achieving a sustainable future. Operational approaches to resilience favor systems' agile return to the status quo following a disruption. Here, we show that an overemphasis on recovery without accounting for transformation entrenches 'resilience traps'-risk factors within a community that are predictive of recovery, but inhibit transformation.

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Surveys are commonly used to quantify public opinions of climate change and to inform sustainability policies. However, conducting large-scale population-based surveys is often a difficult task due to time and resource constraints. This paper outlines a machine learning framework-grounded in statistical learning theory and natural language processing-to augment climate change opinion surveys with social media data.

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Nine in ten major outages in the US have been caused by hurricanes. Long-term outage risk is a function of climate change-triggered shifts in hurricane frequency and intensity; yet projections of both remain highly uncertain. However, outage risk models do not account for the epistemic uncertainties in physics-based hurricane projections under climate change, largely due to the extreme computational complexity.

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Current projections of the climate-sensitive portion of residential electricity demand are based on estimating the temperature response of the mean of the demand distribution. In this work, we show that there is significant asymmetry in the summer-time temperature response of electricity demand in the state of California, with high-intensity demand demonstrating a greater sensitivity to temperature increases. The greater climate sensitivity of high-intensity demand is found not only in the observed data, but also in the projections in the near future (2021-2040) and far future periods (2081-2099), and across all (three) utility service regions in California.

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