Relationality: The Role of Connectedness in the Social Ecology of Resilience.

Previous work has focused on the role of social capital on resilience. However, this research tends to search for civic and other organizations, often formal institutionalized groups which, when they are not found, leads to questions about how social networks are possibly governed. Without formal organizational structures to govern these networks, how is pro-environmental/pro-social behavior sustained.

Building Resilience from the Grassroots: The Cyclone Preparedness Programme at 50.

As Bangladesh's Cyclone Preparedness Programme (CPP) celebrates its 50th anniversary, we reflect on its legacy, the gains made, and progress that still lies ahead. The CPP is unique among disaster risk-management agencies, as more than 90% of its staff consists of community volunteers. This unique institutional design influences its functioning.

Risk Communication for Empowerment: Interventions in a Rohingya Refugee Settlement.

There are many reasons that people, when warned of an impending extreme event, do not take proactive, self-defensive action. We focus on one possible reason, which is that, sometimes, people lack a sense of agency or even experience disempowerment, which can lead to passivity. This article takes up one situation where the possibility of disempowerment is salient, that of Rohingya refugees who were evicted from their homes in Myanmar and forced to cross the border into neighboring Bangladesh.

A cooperative game-theoretic framework for negotiating marine spatial allocation agreements among heterogeneous players.

Marine spatial allocation has become, in recent decades, a political flashpoint, fuelled by political power struggles, as well as the continuously increasing demand for marine space by both traditional and emerging marine uses. To effectively address this issue, we develop a decision-making procedure, that facilitates the distribution of disputed areas of specific size among heterogeneous players in a transparent and ethical way, while considering coalitional formations through coexistence. To do this, we model players' alternative strategies and payoffs within a cooperative game-theoretic framework.

Dempster-Shafer theory applied to regulatory decision process for selecting safer alternatives to toxic chemicals in consumer products.

Regulatory agencies often face a dilemma when regulating chemicals in consumer products-namely, that of making decisions in the face of multiple, and sometimes conflicting, lines of evidence. We present an integrative approach for dealing with uncertainty and multiple pieces of evidence in toxics regulation. The integrative risk analytic framework is grounded in the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory that allows the analyst to combine multiple pieces of evidence and judgments from independent sources of information.

Cost effectiveness of regulation-compliant filtration to control sediment and metal pollution in urban runoff.

The implementation of Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) to control urban runoff presents major structural and managerial challenges for cities. We developed a decision support system (DSS) for TMDL compliance at the city level to solve for a phased, least-cost strategy toward meeting four TMDLs using stormwater filtration. Based on a case-study city, we modeled wet weather flows and associated discharge of Total Suspended Sediment (TSS), cadmium, copper, and zinc to receiving waters by coupling U.

Optimization of stormwater filtration at the urban/watershed interface.

Environmental pollution from cities is a major ecological problem attributed to contaminated runoff from nonpoint sources. The U.S.

Incompatible land uses and the topology of cumulative risk.

The extensive literature on environmental justice has, by now, well defined the essential ingredients of cumulative risk, namely, incompatible land uses and vulnerability. Most problematic is the case when risk is produced by a large aggregation of small sources of air toxics. In this article, we test these notions in an area of Southern California, Southeast Los Angeles (SELA), which has come to be known as Asthmatown.