The research team, led by Natasha Malmin of Georgia State University, surveyed 133 adults visiting a rural food pantry in Williamsburg County during July 2023 and 96 members of the general community in Horry County between October and November of the same year. The pantry serves roughly 1,500 people each month through a drive-through distribution model, and researchers approached every vehicle in the line over two days of data collection, achieving an impressive 93 percent eligibility and completion rate among those who volunteered. The Horry County comparison group was recruited at community festivals, cultural events, and shopping centers, selected deliberately because the suburban county has a considerably wealthier and more educated population.

The demographic contrasts between the two cohorts were striking. The pantry cohort had a median age of 64 years, while the community cohort skewed far younger. Some 76 percent of pantry participants identified as non-Hispanic African American, compared with just 14 percent of the community sample, which was 67 percent non-Hispanic White. Educational attainment diverged sharply as well: half of pantry respondents had only a high school diploma or less, whereas the community group contained large proportions of bachelor’s and graduate degree holders. Williamsburg County itself, where the pantry sits, has a poverty rate of 23 percent and a median household income of $43,471, against Horry County’s 12.6 percent poverty rate and $61,063 median income.

Health burdens told a similarly stark story. The pantry cohort reported hypertension at a rate of 71 percent and diabetes at 41 percent, conditions that carry serious implications for disaster resilience, since chronic disease management depends on uninterrupted access to medication, refrigeration, and care. Only 10 percent of pantry respondents rated their general health as excellent, compared with 23 percent of the community cohort. In an unexpected twist, the community group reported substantially higher rates of self-diagnosed anxiety, at 65 percent, and depression, at 52 percent. The researchers caution that this pattern should be treated as hypothesis-generating rather than conclusive, noting that Williamsburg County lies within a designated mental health care desert, where limited access to diagnosis and care may suppress reported prevalence rather than reflect true differences in mental health burden.

The most consequential findings emerged when respondents described their experiences with federally declared disasters. Both cohorts reported similar frequencies of exposure to the string of storms that have battered the region since 2015, including the Great Flood, Hurricane Matthew, Hurricane Florence, Hurricane Dorian, Hurricane Ian, and Tropical Storm Idalia. Yet when the researchers examined the consequences of that exposure, the divergence was unmistakable. Among those reporting damage, 69 percent of pantry users suffered losses exceeding $3,000, while a majority of the community cohort reported losses below $1,000. Power outages followed the same pattern: 28 percent of pantry respondents sat in the dark for six to ten days, and 18 percent for eleven to twenty days, whereas nearly half of community respondents reported outages shorter than three days.

One structural factor looms particularly large in explaining these disparities: heirs’ property. This form of ownership, in which land passes informally through generations without formal title documentation, is disproportionately common among African American households in the South due to historic exclusion from formal legal systems. Some 57 percent of pantry participants reported heirs’ property ownership, compared with just 19 percent of the community cohort. The consequences are severe, because FEMA disaster assistance historically required documented ownership verification. After Hurricane Katrina, more than 20,000 heirs’ property owners were denied aid, and after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, 80,000 applicants were rejected over land title issues. Within South Carolina alone, researchers have estimated 162,803 acres of heirs’ property, carrying an assessed value of $34.6 million.

The study found that disaster-experienced pantry users relied on FEMA aid at a statistically significantly higher rate than their community counterparts, a seemingly paradoxical result given the documented barriers heirs’ property owners face. FEMA announced policy changes in 2021 intended to ease the application burden for residents of inherited land, but many of the storm impacts reported by pantry users date back to before those reforms, and the authors note that policy implementation often lags, particularly for communities simultaneously navigating age, disability, and educational barriers. The longer outages and larger losses in the pantry cohort also align with emerging evidence that rural and minoritized communities experience slower power restoration after disasters, and with earlier research showing that homes in lower-income areas sustain greater physical damage from comparable hazard exposure, likely reflecting aging housing stock and deferred maintenance.

Climate hazard experiences added further nuance. Fully 80 percent of pantry users reported encountering at least one climate-related hazard, compared with 67 percent of the community sample, a statistically significant difference. Flooding and heatwaves were more commonly reported by the pantry cohort, though not significantly so. Curiously, the community cohort reported significantly more experience with drought, at 15 percent versus 4 percent, and wildfire, at 13 percent versus 1 percent, even though federal wildfire risk indicators rate Williamsburg County as riskier than more than 80 percent of United States counties, against Horry County’s medium ranking above 63 percent. The authors suggest that differences in awareness, hazard salience, and media coverage may drive this perception gap. Heatwave reporting offered another curious wrinkle: pantry users were surveyed during an active National Weather Service heat advisory in July, yet only 24 percent reported having experienced a heatwave, suggesting that even direct exposure does not reliably translate into recognized risk.

The study’s limitations deserve honest mention. Both samples were non-probability convenience samples, so the findings cannot be generalized to all county residents, and the modest sample sizes restricted the analysis to descriptive comparisons using Fisher’s exact tests rather than causal inference. Food security was not measured with a validated scale; instead, pantry use served as a pragmatic proxy for concentrated structural vulnerability, an assumption grounded in prior South Carolina research showing that households with very low food security had 5.9 times higher odds of using food pantries than food-secure households. Timing differences also complicated direct comparison, since Tropical Storm Idalia struck coastal South Carolina between the two survey windows, affecting the Horry sample’s recent experience but not the pantry cohort’s.

Nevertheless, the policy implications are clear and potentially transformative. The authors argue that food pantries, as trusted anchor institutions that already reach populations traditional public health systems often miss, are ideally positioned to serve as hubs for disaster communication, preparedness outreach, early warnings, and heat-health alerts. Prior pantry-based interventions covering nutrition education and chronic disease management demonstrate that these settings can effectively engage hard-to-reach residents, although sustainable implementation will require addressing capacity constraints within pantry systems. As climate change intensifies the frequency and severity of extreme weather across the Southeast, one of the nation’s least climate-prepared regions, the study’s central message resonates beyond South Carolina: communities seeking to build genuine resilience must look not only at hazard maps, but at the food pantry lines, where the most vulnerable residents are already gathered and where recovery, too often, begins from the furthest behind.

Subject of Research: Comparative disaster and climate hazard vulnerability of rural food pantry users in South Carolina

Article Title: Compounded vulnerability: comparing disaster and climate hazard experiences of rural food pantry users with a neighboring suburban community in the Southeastern US

Article References: Malmin, N., Dzokoto, M., Height, T., Le Moal, T., Idowu, O., Driffin, A., & Pressley, T. (2026). Compounded vulnerability: comparing disaster and climate hazard experiences of rural food pantry users with a neighboring suburban community in the Southeastern US. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01140-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01140-w

Keywords: food insecurity, food pantries, disaster recovery, climate hazards, rural health, heirs' property, FEMA assistance, South Carolina, social vulnerability, power outages, chronic disease, hurricanes

The research team, led by investigators at Gaziantep University with collaborators in the United States, recruited Turkish and Syrian refugee mothers of young children through community health centers, refugee support organizations, and municipal contacts in earthquake-affected neighborhoods. Each mother completed a sociodemographic form covering housing damage, displacement, bereavement, children’s sleep and nutrition before and after the disaster, and access to healthcare. Parenting stress was measured with the Turkish adaptation of the Parental Stress Scale (PSS), while the parent–child relationship was assessed using the Child–Parent Relationship Scale (CPRS). Internal consistency was strong across the key subscales, with Cronbach’s alpha values of 0.80 for the PSS Stressor subscale, 0.73 for the CPRS Conflict subscale, and 0.75 for the CPRS Positive Relationship subscale.

From these instruments, the team constructed a composite vulnerability index. The psychosocial component standardized and averaged the PSS Stressor and CPRS Conflict scores, while the disaster-exposure component summed three binary indicators: housing damage, displacement, and loss of a loved one. The final continuous index combined the standardized psychosocial and exposure scores, and for visualization purposes the index was linearly rescaled to a 0-to-20 range while preserving its rank order. Convergent validity was confirmed through correlations with the anchor psychosocial measures, and known-groups validity was demonstrated by significantly different scores across housing damage, displacement, and bereavement categories.

The spatial analysis formed the study’s distinctive technical contribution. Working in ArcGIS Pro 3.6, the researchers created neighborhood boundary polygons and linked them to neighborhood-level summary statistics derived from the participant data. Earthquake intensity was represented by a polygon-based Mercalli intensity layer; neighborhood polygons were intersected with these intensity polygons, overlap areas were calculated, and an area-weighted mean Mercalli intensity value was assigned to each neighborhood. Because only five neighborhoods were available, the geospatial results were interpreted descriptively and exploratively rather than as formal spatial clustering or hotspot analysis. Even so, the mapped outputs revealed visible geographic variation, with certain neighborhoods showing notable outliers of elevated vulnerability against a broadly homogeneous distribution.

The statistical results were striking. In multiple linear regression, higher parental stress on the PSS Stressor subscale (β = +0.208, p = 0.009) and greater parent–child relational conflict on the CPRS Conflict subscale (β = +0.107, p = 0.048) were each significantly associated with higher vulnerability scores. Environmental and social adversities also mattered: housing damage (β = +0.086, p = 0.024), displacement (β = +0.114, p = 0.015), and loss of a loved one (β = +0.092, p = 0.033) all independently predicted greater vulnerability. Yet Syrian refugee status itself was not an independent predictor (β = +0.059, p = 0.352), and logistic regression models confirmed that refugee status did not increase the odds of belonging to the high-risk vulnerability group, defined by the upper quartile of the index distribution.

Mediation and moderation analyses added further precision. The researchers tested whether children’s sleep disturbances and nutrition problems transmitted the effect of parental stress onto vulnerability, but neither pathway reached statistical significance (ACME = −0.064, p = 0.884 for sleep; ACME = −0.070, p = 0.768 for nutrition). Similarly, bereavement did not moderate the relationship between parental stress and vulnerability (interaction β = −0.050, p = 0.151), although bereavement exerted a powerful direct effect on vulnerability (β = +1.24, p < 0.001). In other words, losing a loved one dramatically raises a family’s vulnerability, but it does so without altering how parental stress operates within the household.

The study also documented profound disruption of children’s daily lives in both groups. Regular mealtimes collapsed from 84 percent to 28 percent among refugee families and from 92 percent to 46 percent among Turkish families. The proportion of children described as having very good nutrition fell from 56 to 20 percent in the refugee group and from 49 to 28 percent in the Turkish group, with refugee children showing more selective eating and repetitive food choices. Sleep patterns deteriorated in both communities after the disaster, with refugee mothers reporting ‘inability to sleep’ in 12.2 percent of cases compared with just 2.2 percent among Turkish families. Healthcare access diverged even more sharply: only 14.3 percent of refugee families reported no change in child health monitoring after the earthquake, compared with 59.2 percent of Turkish families, while logistical problems and shortages of doctors were reported far more frequently by refugee households—evidence of systemic barriers that persisted even as the immediate emergency receded.

Interestingly, total parental stress was higher in the Turkish group, driven by the Parental Stressors and Lack of Control subscales, while positive emotional components such as parental reward and satisfaction did not differ between groups. The refugee group scored higher on the total CPRS, reflecting small but similarly directed increases in both conflict and positive-relationship dimensions—a pattern the authors interpret cautiously, suggesting it may indicate intensified family bonds during crisis, in which closeness and conflict rise together, or differing reporting tendencies rather than genuinely lower burden. The theoretical scaffolding of the study drew on the Eco-Biological Developmental model, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems framework, and Tronick’s stress-buffer transduction model, which together explain how caregiver stress can propagate behavioral and physiological changes to infants, making the mother–child dyad the critical unit of post-disaster resilience.

The authors are careful to frame the work’s limitations. The modest sample drawn from only five neighborhoods constrains generalizability and the strength of spatial inference, and convenience-based recruitment through health and community channels may introduce selection bias. The cross-sectional design precludes causal interpretation, and several earthquake-related variables rested on caregiver recall. Even so, the methodological message is clear: vulnerability after catastrophe is a spatially patterned, family-centered phenomenon, and effective recovery requires geographically informed, family-oriented interventions. Protecting routines—meals, sleep, healthcare follow-up—alongside psychosocial support and stress management may do more to reduce long-term harm than blanket aid distributed without regard to where and how need is concentrated. As climate pressures and seismic risk keep disasters on the global agenda, this neighborhood-level mapping approach offers a replicable template for directing scarce resources to the families who need them most.

Subject of Research: Neighborhood-level spatial distribution of post-earthquake psychosocial vulnerability among Turkish and Syrian refugee mothers

Article Title: Spatial distribution of post-earthquake vulnerability among Turkish and Syrian refugee mothers: a neighborhood-level study

Article References: Karadağ, M., Çalıkoğlu, E. O., Bulucu, B. B., Ruhm, F., Çalışgan, B., Coban, G. B., Erk, I., Otucu, E., Kurt, U. B., Chaban, Z., & Koga, P. M. (2026). Spatial distribution of post-earthquake vulnerability among Turkish and Syrian refugee mothers: a neighborhood-level study. Journal of Emergency and Disaster Medicine, 2(1), Article 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44467-026-00013-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44467-026-00013-0

Keywords: earthquake, Turkiye, Syrian refugees, maternal mental health, parental stress, GIS, vulnerability index, child sleep, nutrition disruption, healthcare access, disaster recovery, Gaziantep

The study focused on three wards in Nyanga District—Tangwena, Samanyika, and Kute—that were selected for their documented exposure to the storm and established vulnerability profiles. The researchers drew on eight focus group discussions, 27 in-depth interviews with affected households and key informants from the Department of Civil Protection, UNDP, the Zimbabwe Red Cross Society, and the Meteorological Services Department, alongside field observations and government documents. Conducted primarily in Shona and analyzed thematically using NVivo, the qualitative approach was designed to capture the social and institutional dynamics that quantitative damage assessments often miss. The result is a granular portrait of a disaster that struck households already struggling with poor roads, settlement on steep slopes and floodplains, and the lingering memory of Idai.

The physical impacts of Cyclone Ana were substantial for a moderate storm. Field assessments documented 126 affected houses, 70 of which were rendered uninhabitable, displacing families into temporary shelters and overcrowded public facilities. Flooding damaged boreholes and latrines, forcing some residents into open defecation and others into longer journeys for safe water; one female-headed household reported that daily water collection increased by roughly 3.5 kilometers, adding about two hours to caregiving duties. The Murozi footbridge, which provides access to nine villages and serves approximately 135 schoolchildren, was destroyed, while sections of the Troutbeck-Nyafaru road became impassable, delaying emergency assistance. Because the cyclone hit shortly before the main harvest, maize, bean, and vegetable fields were inundated, irrigation schemes and dip tanks were destroyed, and small livestock were lost during evacuations—triggering cascading effects that included food insecurity, school dropouts, and mounting psychological strain.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns preparedness. Seventy-six percent of participants were unaware of any formal emergency preparedness plans, and roughly 64 percent said they had never been consulted during risk assessments or disaster plan development. Ward-level disaster risk management plans drafted in 2018 with external support were intended to guide local action until 2024, but document analysis showed they remained heavily response-oriented: only 18 percent of their content addressed preparedness, compared with 65 percent devoted to response. Capacity assessments of 45 disaster risk management committee members revealed deep deficits—35 lacked contingency planning experience, 40 had never been trained in post-disaster needs assessment, and about 70 percent reported no refresher training in the previous three years. Only 24 percent of the district’s committees met regularly, while nearly a third were largely inactive.

The researchers trace these weaknesses to structural and legal roots. At the time of Cyclone Ana, Zimbabwe’s disaster framework was still anchored in the Civil Protection Act of 1989, a hazard-focused, response-oriented law that gives limited weight to prevention and preparedness and specifies contingency planning mechanisms only vaguely. Donor funding cycles reinforce the imbalance, mobilizing resources after disasters strike rather than sustaining risk reduction between events. As one official told the researchers, communities ask politicians about new boreholes and clinics, not about disaster preparedness—until the cyclone hits. The result is a governance system in which decentralization exists on paper but budgets, technical support, and decision-making authority remain concentrated at levels far removed from the villages where floods and landslides actually occur.

Early warning performance during Ana was equally revealing. The Meteorological Services Department issued regular bulletins through print, broadcast, and social media in coordination with civil protection authorities, and around 70 percent of participants reported receiving some form of warning. But the messages were technical and generalized, referring broadly to thundery showers, downpours, and strong winds across several provinces without specifying local risks or recommended actions. Terms such as tropical depression and overland depression were poorly understood, particularly among older residents, and warnings rarely addressed secondary hazards like landslides or infrastructure failure. Roughly 30 percent of participants received no warning at all, hindered by unstable mobile networks, poor radio reception in mountainous terrain, and damaged roads that impeded door-to-door communication. Even where 31 evacuation centers had been designated, the district lacked clear evacuation protocols, transport plans, and pre-positioned supplies—so warnings did not consistently translate into protective action.

Social and cognitive factors compounded the problem. More than half of participants believed the storm would not directly affect them, often citing past forecasts they perceived as exaggerated. Others prioritized livestock and crops over personal safety, and some expressed skepticism toward government information. The researchers interpret these patterns through established frameworks such as Protective Action Decision Theory, noting that residents filtered official warnings through prior experience and local knowledge—so-called disaster scripts that normalized risk. One farmer recounted how traditional signs, from the behavior of birds to the color of the evening sky, prompted her family to move their goats to higher ground before dawn, even as the same knowledge could not save their maize crop. Indigenous early warning, the study suggests, is a genuine asset, but one with limits under extreme conditions and in need of integration with technical forecasting rather than substitution for it.

The response phase exposed both institutional fragility and remarkable community resilience. Detailed damage assessments in the worst-hit villages took nearly two weeks, hampered by impassable roads, fuel shortages, and limited vehicles; of the 7.3 million dollars allocated nationally for disaster risk management in 2022, only about 28 percent supported operational logistics. Residents were repeatedly surveyed by different agencies yet received little assistance, and coordination gaps produced fragmented vulnerability data. Meanwhile, only 20 of the 126 affected households received government-prefabricated shelters, with allocations that sometimes ignored household size—one family of more than 20 members received a single unit. In the vacuum, communities organized themselves: youth cleared debris from blocked paths, churches provided food, and families whose homes survived sheltered those who had lost everything. The authors argue these grassroots efforts were not merely a stopgap but a core, under-recognized component of community-based disaster risk management that formal systems should support, resource, and scale.

Recovery, supported in part by a crisis modifier under the Zimbabwe Resilience Building Fund and technical backing from UNDP, produced genuine gains alongside persistent inequities. Forty houses received reconstruction or rehabilitation support guided by Build Back Better principles, and a piped water supply installed at Dazi School and Clinic allowed services to resume—what the authors call a recovery surplus, improving conditions beyond pre-disaster baselines. Roads and footbridges along the Troutbeck-Dazi-Nyafaru corridor were rehabilitated, roughly 600 farmers received short-cycle seed inputs, and 126 local leaders and officials received disaster risk reduction training. Yet many households were left patching roofs with plastic sheeting and salvaged debris, and eligibility criteria excluded some affected farmers from livelihood support entirely. Short funding cycles and narrow targeting, the study concludes, can entrench the very vulnerabilities recovery is meant to reduce.

The broader significance of the Nyanga case lies in what it establishes as a baseline for reform. Since Cyclone Ana, Zimbabwe has pursued a new Disaster Risk Management and Civil Protection Bill, impact-based forecasting, anticipatory action frameworks, and strengthened contingency planning—developments the authors welcome as real progress. But their analysis identifies a critical implementation gap between policy commitments and local practice, visible in gaps of interpretation, coordination, financing, and first-mile communication. Closing it, they argue, requires aligning legislative reform, sustainable financing, and institutional capacity with genuinely community-centered approaches that embed local knowledge and participation across every stage of risk governance. As cyclones such as Freddy, Filipo, and Chido continue to test the region, the lesson from Nyanga is that effective disaster management depends not only on better forecasts and laws, but on sustained investment in the institutions, trust, and collective capacities of the communities who face the storm first.

Subject of Research: Disaster preparedness, response, and recovery from Tropical Cyclone Ana in Nyanga District, Zimbabwe

Article Title: Assessing Disaster Preparedness and Recovery from Tropical Cyclones in Zimbabwe: Insights from Cyclone Ana in Nyanga

Article References: Mabumbo, D., & Ngulube, N. K. (2026). Assessing Disaster Preparedness and Recovery from Tropical Cyclones in Zimbabwe: Insights from Cyclone Ana in Nyanga. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-026-00759-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13753-026-00759-1

Keywords: tropical cyclones, Zimbabwe, Cyclone Ana, disaster risk management, early warning systems, community-based disaster risk management, Nyanga District, Cyclone Idai, build back better, anticipatory action, disaster recovery, impact-based forecasting