The headline finding is deceptively simple. Hurricanes cause economic losses equivalent to about two days of typical sales in affected areas. That is a real hit, but it is a far cry from the weeks-long shutdowns that dominate public perception after catastrophic storms. Even more notable is the speed of the rebound: local economies recover to pre-hurricane levels within roughly ten days. The study, led by Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore together with Smarajit Paul Choudhury of the Mastercard Economics Institute, Mingxuan Fan of the National University of Singapore, and Leora Klapper of the World Bank, provides some of the first systematic real-time evidence on how local economies adjust to hurricanes as they happen.

The technical achievement behind these numbers lies in the data infrastructure. The researchers used aggregated and anonymized transaction data, provided under controlled access by the Mastercard Economics Institute, to measure merchant sales and consumer spending at daily frequency across thousands of ZIP codes. This granularity matters enormously. Traditional economic damage assessments rely on surveys, insurance claims, or official statistics that arrive weeks or months after the event, by which time the recovery has already occurred and the dynamics of disruption have been lost. Daily transaction data, by contrast, capture the economic pulse of a community as the storm approaches, makes landfall, and passes, allowing researchers to watch the disruption unfold hour by hour and day by day.

One of the study’s most consequential findings concerns what economists call substitution. In theory, when a hurricane shuts down businesses in one location, consumers might simply shift their spending to neighboring areas that escaped the worst of the storm, or they might move purchases across channels, buying online instead of from flooded storefronts. If such substitution were widespread, the aggregate economic damage of a hurricane would be much smaller than the local damage suggests. But the researchers found limited offsetting substitution across locations and channels. The losses in hit areas are not meaningfully recouped by gains elsewhere, meaning the disruption represents a genuine net loss to the economy rather than a mere reshuffling of economic activity.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive result is that storm category alone is a poor predictor of short-run economic impacts. A Category 4 storm that makes landfall in a sparsely populated area with robust infrastructure may cause less economic disruption than a weaker storm that strikes a densely populated urban corridor with fragile power grids. Instead, the study found that economic disruption increases with physical damage, evacuation restrictions, and infrastructure outages. These are the variables that actually matter for the economic pulse of a community. Evacuation orders, by emptying towns of consumers, can shut down sales even before the storm arrives. Power outages, by disabling payment systems and refrigeration, can keep businesses closed after the skies have cleared. Physical damage to buildings and roads determines how quickly commerce can resume.

The disruption and recovery patterns also vary significantly across industries, merchant types, and sales channels. Restaurants, which depend on foot traffic and perishable inventory, likely experience different disruption dynamics than hardware stores, which may see surges in demand as residents prepare for and repair after storms. Online merchants may weather the disruption differently than brick-and-mortar establishments. These differences matter for policymakers trying to target relief efforts and for businesses trying to anticipate how a storm will affect their operations. The study’s industry-level breakdown provides a granular map of economic vulnerability that could inform everything from emergency lending programs to supply chain planning.

The findings arrive at a moment of growing urgency. Climate projections indicate substantial increases in hurricane activity under continued warming, meaning the economic exposure of coastal communities is set to grow in the decades ahead. Understanding the short-run dynamics of disruption and recovery is therefore not merely an academic exercise. It helps identify the conditions under which short-run economic disruption is most severe, which in turn can guide the design of evacuation policies, infrastructure hardening, and emergency financial support. If power outages and evacuation restrictions are the key drivers of economic pain, then investments in grid resilience and communication systems may yield outsized economic benefits relative to their cost.

The research also carries implications for how economists and policymakers measure the cost of natural disasters. Official damage estimates typically focus on physical destruction, the value of destroyed property and infrastructure. But the study suggests that the short-run economic disruption, the lost sales and interrupted commerce, represents a distinct and measurable component of hurricane costs. Because the disruption is brief, it may be systematically underestimated in traditional assessments that arrive too late to capture it. Real-time transaction data offer a way to fill this gap, providing a running tally of economic damage as the storm unfolds rather than a retrospective estimate after the fact.

The study was supported financially by the World Bank Research Support Budget, and the authors are careful to note that the findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in the paper are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Mastercard, the World Bank, or the governments they represent. Mastercard provided data access for academic research purposes only and had no role in study design, analysis, interpretation, or the decision to publish. These safeguards matter for a study that relies on proprietary financial data, and they help establish the credibility of the results for a research community that has long called for better real-time economic monitoring of natural disasters.

As warming oceans continue to fuel more intense Atlantic hurricane seasons, the ability to watch local economies stumble and recover in real time may become one of the most valuable tools in the climate adaptation toolkit. The study’s message is ultimately one of measured reassurance mixed with caution: local economies are more resilient in the short run than the aftermath of catastrophic storms might suggest, bouncing back within ten days, but the depth of disruption depends on factors that are within human control, the robustness of infrastructure, the design of evacuation policies, and the speed of physical repairs. In the race between warming and adaptation, real-time economic data may prove to be the compass that shows which investments actually keep communities economically alive when the next storm makes landfall.

Subject of Research: Real-time measurement of economic disruption and recovery in US ZIP codes affected by Atlantic hurricanes using daily transaction data

Article Title: Real-time economic disruption and recovery from Atlantic hurricanes across the US

Article References: Agarwal, S., Choudhury, S. P., Fan, M., & Klapper, L. (2026). Real-time economic disruption and recovery from Atlantic hurricanes across the US. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-78686-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-78686-4

Keywords: hurricanes, economic disruption, recovery, transaction data, ZIP codes, substitution, infrastructure outages, evacuation, storm category, climate change impacts, environmental economics, Nature Communications

1,4-Dioxane is not a chemical that anyone deliberately adds to the environment in large quantities. Instead, it arrives as an unintended byproduct. It forms during the manufacture of ethoxylated chemicals, including many detergents, shampoos, and cosmetics, and it was historically used as a stabilizer in chlorinated solvents such as 1,1,1-trichloroethane. Because it is fully miscible with water, has a low octanol-water partition coefficient, and resists both volatilization and biodegradation under typical conditions, it moves through soil and groundwater far more readily than most industrial contaminants. Conventional water treatment struggles to remove it, which is why regulators and scientists have grown increasingly concerned about its presence in drinking water sources across the United States and around the world.

The research team, led by Sarajeen Saima Hoque and Youneng Tang of Florida State University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering together with Amita Jain of Florida A&M University’s Center for Water Resources, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do seasons and geography shape the amount of 1,4-dioxane in a real urban and agricultural landscape? They sampled surface water from four lakes in and around Tallahassee and wastewater at multiple treatment stages at the city’s water reclamation facility, measuring concentrations in the laboratory and pairing the results with field measurements of water temperature and precipitation records from NASA’s Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources database.

The seasonal signal was unmistakable. In both surface water and wastewater, 1,4-dioxane concentrations were highest during spring and lowest during summer. Regression analyses showed that the concentrations were negatively correlated with both water temperature and precipitation. In other words, the hotter and wetter the conditions, the lower the measured concentrations. The explanation the authors point to is dilution: Florida’s intense summer rains and thunderstorms flush large volumes of water through the landscape, spreading the chemical across a much larger volume and washing it out of the system. In drier spring conditions, when flows are lower and contaminant inputs are not offset by heavy runoff, the chemical becomes more concentrated.

Geography told an equally compelling story. The lake with the highest concentrations was Lake Talquin, a reservoir associated with a large mixed-use watershed and a long residence time, meaning water and anything dissolved in it lingers there for an extended period. That combination, a broad catchment carrying runoff from varied land uses and a slow turnover of water, gives contaminants ample opportunity to accumulate. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the lake with the lowest concentration had limited connectivity to surrounding contamination sources and a smaller, more isolated drainage area. The contrast underscores a principle that water quality managers know well but rarely see quantified for this particular chemical: the architecture of a watershed, not just the presence of pollution sources, determines how much of a persistent contaminant ends up in the water.

One of the most dramatic findings involved hurricanes. When major storms struck the region, 1,4-dioxane concentrations in the lakes responded immediately. But the direction and magnitude of the response varied from lake to lake, depending on the balance between two competing effects. Storms can increase the input of dioxane by mobilizing contaminated runoff from urban and industrial surfaces, yet they simultaneously deliver enormous volumes of relatively clean rainwater that dilute whatever is already in the lake. Which effect wins depends on the characteristics of each watershed and the state of the lake at the time. This nuance matters for anyone trying to predict how extreme weather, which is becoming more frequent in a warming climate, will affect contaminant levels in surface waters.

The wastewater side of the study produced perhaps the most surprising result of all. The highest 1,4-dioxane concentration measured in the entire study was found not in the raw influent entering the treatment plant but in the tertiary effluent, the water that has passed through the most advanced stage of treatment. The researchers suggest a counterintuitive explanation: the chemical may be formed in situ during treatment itself, when chlorination oxidizes precursor compounds that are structurally related to dioxane. If confirmed, this would mean that a disinfection step designed to protect public health may inadvertently be creating a persistent contaminant in the very water destined for discharge into the environment. Similar formation pathways have been suspected in other treatment contexts, but documenting the pattern at a working municipal plant adds weight to a growing concern in the water treatment community.

Statistical analysis confirmed that the patterns were not random noise. The study found significant seasonal, spatial, and treatment-stage effects on 1,4-dioxane concentrations, with p-values below 0.05 for each factor. That triple confirmation matters because it suggests the findings are robust enough to inform monitoring strategy. If regulators know that spring is the season of peak concentrations, that lakes with large, well-connected, mixed-use watersheds are the most vulnerable, and that tertiary treatment can raise rather than lower dioxane levels, they can target their sampling resources far more effectively than a calendar-blind, location-blind program would allow.

The broader context makes the study timely. 1,4-Dioxane has been detected in drinking water systems across the United States, and monitoring efforts in places like North Carolina’s Cape Fear River basin have traced elevated levels to industrial discharges. Recent reviews describe it as a contaminant of emerging concern with significant regulatory disparities between jurisdictions: some states have adopted health advisory limits in the parts-per-trillion range while federal drinking water standards remain absent. The compound’s persistence means that once it enters an aquifer or a lake, it does not simply disappear. Biodegradation is possible under specific conditions, and researchers, including the Tallahassee team, have explored microbial approaches to breaking the chemical down, but natural attenuation in surface waters is slow and unreliable.

For the residents of Tallahassee and the millions of people living in similar landscapes across the humid southeastern United States, the study carries a practical message. The risk posed by 1,4-dioxane in surface water is not static. It breathes with the seasons, surges with storms, and shifts with the geography of the land. Wet summers offer a natural reprieve through dilution, while dry springs concentrate whatever is flowing through the system. Lakes like Talquin, with their large watersheds and long water residence times, act as slow-motion reservoirs of contamination, while smaller, isolated water bodies fare better. And the wastewater treatment plant, rather than being a barrier, may be a source, at least when chlorination chemistry is involved. As the EPA weighs how to regulate this likely carcinogen and utilities grapple with the cost of removing it, studies like this one provide the local, seasonal, and process-level detail that turns a national problem into something that can actually be managed, one watershed and one treatment plant at a time.

Subject of Research: Seasonal and spatial variation of 1,4-dioxane contamination in surface waters and wastewater in Tallahassee, Florida

Article Title: Seasonal variation and geographical distribution of 1,4-dioxane in surface waters and wastewaters in Tallahassee, Florida, USA

Article References: Hoque, S. S., Jain, A., & Tang, Y. (2026). Seasonal variation and geographical distribution of 1,4-dioxane in surface waters and wastewaters in Tallahassee, Florida, USA. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 198(10), Article 1041. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-026-15897-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10661-026-15897-8

Keywords: 1,4-dioxane, surface water, wastewater, seasonal variation, water quality, watershed, dilution, hurricanes, chlorination, emerging contaminants, Florida, environmental monitoring

The study, published in the journal Earth’s Future, was led by Md Shadman Sakib, a doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, working with David F. Muñoz, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; Jennifer Irish, Charles P. Lunsford Professor of civil and environmental engineering; and Thomas Wahl, professor of civil, environmental, and construction engineering at the University of Central Florida. Rather than relying on the handful of hurricanes recorded in the historical database, the team turned to a powerful statistical tool: the STORM synthetic tropical cyclone dataset, which represents 10,000 years of statistically generated storm activity. That approach gave the researchers access to thousands of plausible storm conditions, including the rare, extreme events that pose the greatest flood risk but almost never appear in observational records.

“The storms that pose the greatest flood risk are rare in historical records,” Sakib explained. “Statistically generated synthetic storms let us test how the bay could respond to events it has not yet experienced.” From the vast synthetic catalog, the researchers selected 90 representative storms capable of affecting the Chesapeake Bay and ran each one through a process-based numerical simulation designed to capture the estuary’s full hydrodynamic complexity. The model accounted for tides, winds, atmospheric pressure, waves, river inflows, and the precise shape and bathymetry of the bay itself, from its deep shipping channels to its shallow fringing flats.

The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States, stretching more than 200 miles from Maryland to its mouth in Virginia, fed by more than 150 rivers and streams and connected to the Atlantic Ocean. That long, narrow funnel shape, combined with its network of rivers, sounds, natural barriers, and smaller waterways, fundamentally alters how storm-driven water moves through the system. The bay’s response to a hurricane is therefore nothing like the response of an open, straight coastline, where surge simply piles up and propagates alongshore. In the Chesapeake, water sloshes, converges, and resonates in ways that can amplify flooding in one tributary while sparing another just a few miles away.

To peer into the future, the team layered sea-level rise onto the storm simulations. They modeled four different sea-level conditions for 2050 based on projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, those projections translate to between 13 and 21 inches of rise, roughly 0.34 to 0.54 meters, with a median estimate of about 17 inches. “Seventeen inches may not sound like much, but it raises the baseline for every storm,” Sakib said. “A storm that causes minor flooding today could cause serious flooding by midcentury, simply because it starts from higher water.” The lower Chesapeake region also faces land subsidence, meaning the bay is experiencing faster relative sea-level rise than most of the world’s coastlines, compounding the risk.

One of the study’s central contributions lies in its treatment of nonlinear interactions, the phenomenon that emerges when tides, storm surge, and waves coincide. When these forces overlap in time, they do not simply add together; the total water level can end up higher or lower than the arithmetic sum of its parts. Shallow estuaries like the Chesapeake are especially prone to such effects, because friction between moving water and the seabed changes with depth. Sakib’s analysis mapped how these nonlinear interactions vary across the bay and, crucially, how they shift as sea levels climb.

The results were striking. Rising sea levels pushed total water levels higher overall while simultaneously weakening some of the nonlinear processes that naturally dampen storm surge, reducing their mitigating effect by about 5 to 9 percent. In other words, the bay loses part of its built-in buffering capacity precisely when it needs it most. “Sea-level rise raises the base water level directly, and on top of that, it weakens the bay’s natural ability to dampen storm surge,” Sakib noted. “If that continues, coastal communities could face higher and harder-to-buffer flood levels in the decades ahead.”

Among all the storm characteristics the team examined, intensity mattered most, particularly in the lower Chesapeake Bay near the ocean entrance. Interactions among tides, surge, and waves could either raise or lower water levels beyond what those forces would produce independently, and stronger storms generally produced larger changes in the lower bay, while the upper bay proved far less sensitive to how intense a storm became. Storm speed played an important supporting role: strong, slow-moving storms generated the largest impacts, especially within about 30 miles of the bay’s entrance, where water levels could swing by as much as 3 feet depending on the storm’s characteristics. The strongest effects in the lower bay generally coincided with the peak of the storm surge, around the time of landfall, and the flooding footprint extended well into the James and York rivers, the eastern bay, and smaller tributaries.

The bay’s distinctive geography explains much of this spatial variation. Its shallow areas, narrow channels, changing depths, and branching tributaries all govern how storm-driven water propagates inland. “The Chesapeake is long, shallow, and shaped like a funnel, which controls how a storm plays out,” Sakib said. In the lower bay, deeper channels and proximity to the ocean allow storms to retain more of their energy, so surge and waves arrive with full force. Farther north, storms lose energy as they move inland and the funnel narrows, muting the response. Rising sea levels could redraw those patterns entirely, meaning a single hurricane could affect different parts of the Chesapeake Bay in profoundly different ways, with some communities facing amplified flooding while others see comparatively modest impacts.

Beyond its immediate findings for the Chesapeake, the research offers a transferable framework for studying how similar estuaries around the world might respond to extreme storms under rising seas. By combining synthetic storm catalogs with high-fidelity numerical simulation, coastal scientists can stress-test scenarios that have never occurred in the instrumental record, giving planners and emergency managers a probabilistic view of future flood risk rather than a backward-looking one. For the more than 18 million people living in the Chesapeake watershed, that means a clearer picture of which neighborhoods, roads, and infrastructure face the greatest exposure by midcentury, and a scientific foundation for the hard decisions about adaptation, from elevating homes to restoring wetlands, that rising water will demand.

Subject of Research: Modeling nonlinear interactions between tropical cyclones, tides, waves, and sea-level rise on total water levels in the Chesapeake Bay

Article Title: Mapping how hurricanes could affect the Chesapeake Bay as sea levels rise

Article References: Mapping how hurricanes could affect the Chesapeake Bay as sea levels rise. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Chesapeake Bay, hurricanes, storm surge, sea-level rise, synthetic tropical cyclones, nonlinear interactions, coastal flooding, estuary dynamics, numerical modeling, climate projections, Virginia Tech, Earth's Future

The conceptual heart of the study lies in distinguishing two related but distinct phenomena. Compound risks emerge when multiple climatic drivers, hazards, or vulnerabilities interact to produce impacts greater than any factor alone would suggest, whether simultaneously, as when heat and drought strike together, or sequentially, as when prolonged drought is followed by intense rainfall on desiccated, impermeable ground. Cascading risks describe something different: the propagation of an initial shock through interconnected systems, so that a meteorological event becomes a crisis of electricity, water, telecommunications, housing, mobility, and public health. A heatwave strains the electricity grid at precisely the moment demand for cooling peaks; a power outage then disables water pumping, refrigeration, traffic control, and hospital systems. The authors emphasize that these terms are not synonyms, and that conflating them obscures the specific pathways through which urban crises unfold.

Underpinning the analysis is the idea that cities are not passive recipients of hazards but dense socio-technical systems in which physical infrastructure, economic activity, ecological conditions, social vulnerability, and institutional decision-making are deeply intertwined. Electricity, water supply, drainage, transport, telecommunications, food distribution, and emergency response are so interdependent that a disruption in one domain can propagate across the others, transforming a localized event into a systemic urban crisis. Crucially, the authors note, infrastructure is not merely technical. It is shaped by political choices, investment patterns, maintenance gaps, institutional fragmentation, and unequal territorial development, which means that resilience is as much a governance, finance, and equity challenge as an engineering one.

To build the evidence base, the researchers conducted a targeted comparative scoping review combined with qualitative policy-document analysis, covering literature published primarily between January 2020 and June 2026. Searches in Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, supplemented by policy repositories and conducted in both English and Spanish, yielded a final corpus of 81 sources: 54 academic publications and 27 policy, governmental, or institutional documents. Each source was coded across eight dimensions, including hazard profile, compound interaction, cascading pathway, social amplification, governance challenge, funding challenge, and policy response. The urban cases spanned New Orleans and Los Angeles in the United States; Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax, Calgary, and Edmonton in Canada; and Mexico City, Monterrey, Acapulco, and Veracruz–Boca del Río in Mexico, selected to capture contrasting combinations of coastal storms, heat, drought, flooding, sea-level rise, and institutional capacity.

The United States cases reveal the tension between strong subnational innovation and unstable federal climate policy. New Orleans illustrates how a coastal hazard becomes a systemic urban crisis: Hurricane Katrina combined storm surge and flooding with levee failure, electricity and communications disruption, constrained emergency access, housing loss, prolonged displacement, and racialized recovery outcomes. The city now possesses a relatively mature hazard-mitigation architecture linking its Hazard Mitigation Office, Office of Sustainability, NOLA Ready, and the Sewerage and Water Board, yet institutional coordination and equitable implementation remain continuing challenges. Los Angeles, meanwhile, faces interacting heat, drought, wildfire and smoke, flooding, and electricity stress, and benefits from California’s adaptation strategy and novel financing mechanisms such as climate-resilience districts under Senate Bill 852. But responsibility for heat, wildfire, water, drainage, energy, and housing remains divided among agencies, and the availability of state and federal funds varies across programs and political cycles.

Canada presents a different profile: a relatively advanced national adaptation framework paired with a persistent urban implementation gap. The National Adaptation Strategy establishes shared goals for disaster resilience, health, nature, infrastructure, and the economy, while provinces retain major responsibilities for municipalities, land use, and emergency management. Canada’s National Issues Report concludes that local governments are moving from planning toward implementation, but that action is not keeping pace with present and projected risks. Toronto’s climate-risk assessment connects heat, flooding, wildfire smoke, infrastructure, and vulnerable populations; Vancouver’s adaptation strategy integrates sea-level rise and coastal exposure; Halifax, Calgary, and Edmonton each maintain formal strategies. The recurring deficit, the review finds, is not the absence of plans but the incomplete integration of municipal instruments with infrastructure ownership, provincial authority, long-term finance, Indigenous governance, and operational performance indicators.

Mexico’s cases expose how cascading risks intensify under uneven urbanization, water insecurity, infrastructure deficits, informality, and fragmented metropolitan governance. In the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, drought and flooding are interconnected rather than opposing risks: low reservoir levels in the Cutzamala system, groundwater depletion, subsidence, leakage, and unequal household access can convert climatic drought into a wider service and governance crisis, while intense rainfall overwhelms drainage and mobility systems. Monterrey’s 2022 water crisis combined prolonged drought, reservoir depletion, infrastructure deficiencies, and unequal access. Acapulco offers perhaps the most dramatic illustration: Hurricane Otis in 2023, a rapidly intensifying cyclone, damaged housing, hotels, roads, electricity, water, telecommunications, and livelihoods, turning a single storm into an urban economic and social crisis. The Veracruz–Boca del Río conurbation demonstrates horizontal fragmentation, where the ecological and infrastructure system is metropolitan but planning authority and budgets remain divided between two municipalities and the state.

From the cross-case comparison, the authors distill three types of governance deficit. A vertical deficit occurs when national or state commitments are not matched by predictable municipal finance, authority, or implementation support, a pattern visible in Canadian municipal dependence on federal programs, U.S. dependence on shifting federal funding, and Mexican municipal dependence on state institutions. A horizontal deficit arises when sectoral agencies or adjacent municipalities manage interconnected systems separately, as in Los Angeles infrastructure governance, Mexico City’s metropolitan water system, and Veracruz–Boca del Río. An operational deficit emerges when plans or risk atlases identify hazards but remain weakly connected to budgets, maintenance, enforcement, monitoring, or social protection, with Acapulco cited as a clear example. A study of twenty North American city governments cited in the review similarly found that resilience governance frequently remains divided across agencies and sectors even when climate risks are cross-sectoral.

The review also highlights a subtler danger: strategies intended to enhance resilience to one event may inadvertently reduce resilience to another concurrent hazard. Prospective analysis, infrastructure stress testing, and scenario planning can help identify and minimize such unintended consequences, particularly as research projects increases in the frequency and duration of compound dry-hot extremes across major U.S. cities under the combined effects of climate change and urban development. Community-centered approaches and the co-design of problem-solving processes can strengthen adaptation programs, while interagency coordination and transdisciplinary research are needed to address effects that move across sectors and reduce siloed management. The authors caution that their findings should be interpreted as an analytically structured synthesis rather than a statistical ranking of urban performance, given the targeted nature of the review and the uneven evidence base across countries.

The ultimate message is a call to move from isolated adaptation measures toward integrated risk governance. Cities are exposed not only to individual hazards but to hazards that interact with one another and with the infrastructure, social, and governance systems that sustain urban life. A heatwave can become an energy and public-health crisis; a drought can become a water, economic, and governance crisis; a hurricane can become a housing, telecommunications, transport, energy, and social-protection crisis. Without prospective scenario planning, infrastructure stress testing, stable resilience financing, intersectoral metropolitan coordination, and equity-centered infrastructure planning, the authors warn, cities may remain trapped in reactive cycles of emergency response and reconstruction rather than achieving sustained risk reduction. The future of urban resilience, the review suggests, will depend on whether cities can govern the relationships among infrastructure, inequality, finance, and climate uncertainty in coordinated and equitable ways.

Subject of Research: Compound and cascading climate risks in urban infrastructure governance and resilience in North American cities

Article Title: Compound and cascading climate risks in urban infrastructure governance and resilience across North America

Article References: Lucatello, S., & Henríquez, B. P. (2026). Compound and cascading climate risks in urban infrastructure governance and resilience across North America. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 201. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00374-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00374-1

Keywords: compound climate risk, cascading failures, urban resilience, critical infrastructure, climate adaptation, governance, North America, flooding, extreme heat, drought, hurricanes, social vulnerability

The research, led by Chenxi Hu of the University of Texas at Austin together with Xinxin Sui of the National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research, Dev Niyogi, Clint N. Dawson, and Zong-Liang Yang, analyzed 885 observed tropical cyclone landfall events spanning the years 1979 through 2024. That forty-five-year record allowed the team to compute how the rate of post-landfall weakening has changed over time for storms of different intensities. The results were striking. Strong storms, defined in the study as those with maximum sustained winds of at least 29 meters per second, now weaken 18.6 percent faster after landfall than they did in the earlier part of the record. Weak storms, by contrast, persist 14.5 percent longer once they move inland, holding onto their circulation and their rainfall-producing capacity well beyond where past storms of similar strength would have fizzled.

This split behavior matters because the two trends create opposite hazard profiles. A strong hurricane that decays rapidly after landfall concentrates its destructive winds and coastal surge near the shore, intensifying the already devastating impacts on coastal communities. A weak storm that lingers, however, becomes a slow-moving rain engine, pushing flooding rainfall and inland wind damage into regions that may have little experience preparing for tropical systems. The study’s authors describe the result as a dual-threat landscape: coastal impacts from faster-dying strong storms on one side, and expanding inland risks from increasingly persistent weak systems on the other.

What makes the divergence particularly interesting from a physical standpoint is that the two storm classes respond to fundamentally different aspects of the changing environment. The researchers found that weak storms are governed primarily by thermodynamic factors. Warmer sea surfaces pump more energy into storms before landfall, an enhanced atmospheric moisture supply keeps their circulations fueled after they leave the coast, and increased oceanic influence along storm tracks means that even over land, weak systems can draw on wetter conditions that slow their decline. All three of these thermodynamic trends favor prolonged inland persistence, and weak storms, it turns out, are exquisitely sensitive to them.

Strong storms tell a different story. Their post-landfall behavior is more tightly coupled to dynamic and land-surface conditions rather than to heat and moisture alone. Over the study period, storms have been translating faster, and a faster-moving cyclone spends less time over any given stretch of terrain, but it also experiences more rapid changes in the forces acting on it. At the same time, atmospheric stability has been increasing, which suppresses the deep convective activity that a strong cyclone needs to maintain its inner core once its oceanic energy supply is cut off. Drier soils compound the problem, reducing the evaporation and latent heat fluxes from the land surface that can partially sustain a storm’s circulation. Together, these dynamic disruptions promote faster decay in strong systems, which the study shows are more vulnerable to such disruption than their weaker counterparts.

To move beyond correlation and probe the underlying mechanisms, the team conducted numerical experiments that isolated the different environmental influences. Those simulations confirmed the observational picture: weaker storms respond more strongly to thermodynamic enhancement, gaining longevity when moisture and surface heating conditions improve, whereas stronger storms are disproportionately damaged by dynamic disruption. In other words, the same changing climate is pushing the two ends of the tropical cyclone intensity spectrum in opposite directions after landfall, not because the environment is inconsistent, but because the storms themselves have different sensitivities depending on how powerful they are.

The implications for risk assessment are immediate. Most existing hazard models and building codes implicitly assume that environmental change affects storms of all intensities uniformly, so a trend identified for the average landfalling cyclone is applied across the board. The new findings show that this uniform-response assumption can misallocate protective resources in both directions. Coastal defenses and evacuation planning may need to account for strong storms that deliver their worst impacts in a compressed window near the shore, while inland flood management, dam operations, and emergency response networks in regions far from the coast face a growing burden from weak but persistent tropical systems that historically would have decayed before reaching them.

The geographic dimension of the problem is equally consequential. Regions that have historically been spared the worst of tropical cyclone impacts, precisely because weak storms tended to die quickly after landfall, may now find themselves in the path of systems that survive longer over land. These vulnerable and often unprepared areas may lack the drainage infrastructure, floodplain zoning, and public awareness campaigns that coastal populations have developed over generations of exposure. The study’s authors urge refined hazard assessment and adaptation strategies that explicitly account for intensity-dependent behavior rather than relying on aggregate storm statistics that blend strong and weak systems into a single, misleading average.

The methodological foundation of the work rests on a careful observational record. By assembling nearly nine hundred landfall events across four and a half decades and stratifying them by intensity, the researchers could separate long-term trends in decay behavior from the considerable natural variability that characterizes individual storm seasons. The combination of global observations with targeted numerical experiments gives the findings a robustness that purely statistical studies often lack, and the open-access publication ensures that the underlying analysis can be scrutinized and extended by other research groups. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program, with additional support from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research.

As the climate continues to warm, the divergence documented in this study is likely to become more pronounced rather than less. Continued sea-surface warming and a moister atmosphere will keep strengthening the thermodynamic lifeline that sustains weak storms over land, while trends toward faster storm motion, greater stability, and drier soils in many landfall regions will continue to erode the resilience of strong systems once they leave the ocean. For forecasters, the message is that intensity must become a first-order variable in post-landfall prediction, not an afterthought. For the public, the message is subtler but no less important: the storms that linger quietly over the interior, stripped of their category ratings but not of their rainfall, may pose the fastest-growing tropical cyclone threat to the largest number of people.

Subject of Research: Intensity-dependent trends in the post-landfall decay of tropical cyclones

Article Title: Divergent trends in post-landfall decay of strong and weak tropical cyclones

Article References: Hu, C., Sui, X., Niyogi, D., Dawson, C. N., & Yang, Z.-L. (2026). Divergent trends in post-landfall decay of strong and weak tropical cyclones. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77958-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-77958-3

Keywords: tropical cyclones, landfall, post-landfall decay, hurricanes, climate change, inland flooding, storm intensity, thermodynamics, atmospheric moisture, land surface, hazard assessment, Nature Communications

The starting point of the analysis is a deceptively simple observation: hazards are not evenly distributed across the globe, and neither is attention. Some regions have built deep expertise in the one or two threats they face most often, while other potential hazards go unmanaged entirely. The all-hazards approach, formally born in the late 1970s when the United States National Governors’ Association articulated the principles of comprehensive emergency management, was meant to fix exactly this blind spot. The idea was that governments at every level should prepare for and respond to all kinds of hazards rather than treating each threat in isolation. In practice, the United States could not fully implement the approach until the 1980s, and even then regions clashed over how to apply it, with law enforcement officials and firefighters sometimes disagreeing within the same jurisdiction about how a common plan should work.

Today, the vocabulary of all-hazard management, sometimes called multi-hazard, all-risk, or societal resilience management, appears in national strategies around the world, and globalization has spread emergency management information across borders faster than ever. Yet the review finds that the field still has not addressed the concept comprehensively. Researchers have repeatedly shown that existing practices fall short on interagency coordination, resource allocation, decision-making, stakeholder communication, policy implementation, and institutional learning. Alternative proposals, such as emphasizing functional management of communication and transportation systems across all hazards, have helped, but the gap persists. Among all hazard families, the review argues, wind is where the gap is widest, because practitioners discuss air pollution, hurricanes, and wildfires while disregarding wind direction as a meteorological driver, pollinator decline as an ecological disturbance, and localized indigenous wind phenomena such as gap winds and dust devils.

The scientific framing here matters. The study treats all wind hazards as climatological hazards generated by atmospheric processes rather than as isolated variables. Damaging winds arise from interactions among boundary-layer dynamics, surface roughness, land-sea thermal contrasts, synoptic circulation, convective instability, and wind-field variability. Wind itself is simply air moving from high-pressure to low-pressure areas, and the larger the pressure difference, the faster it moves, but that moving air also carries pollutants, moisture, heat, and pollen. Recent climate science has reinforced how much long-term atmospheric circulation patterns, shifting thermal gradients, and regional climate variability control the frequency, intensity, and geography of hazardous wind events, which means effective management must combine short-term meteorological forecasting with long-term climate adaptation. Empirical and modeling studies now allow intensity, persistence, direction, and circulation patterns to be quantitatively analyzed through observational datasets, synoptic climatology, and numerical modeling, giving hazard managers a far more robust scientific foundation than a decade ago.

To organize the evidence, the review distinguishes two analytical categories. External hazard-oriented management addresses the observable hazards within the current boundary of wind: air pollution, hurricanes, and wildfires. Internal meteorological process management addresses the unexpected or unobservable processes behind them, including wind direction as a driver, wind-related ecological disturbance, and location-specific wind systems that modify rather than constitute hazards. Conceptually, these are treated as a linked sequence rather than equivalent categories: meteorological drivers shape the conditions under which hazards emerge, hazards produce direct physical impacts or ecological disturbances, and those disturbances in turn modify vulnerability and subsequent risk. The method behind the paper was a structured narrative review, supported by the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram, that systematically identified, screened, and synthesized English-language literature spanning climatology, meteorology, engineering, emergency management, and public policy, with iterative thematic coding applied across three units of analysis: international organizations, developed countries, and developing countries.

The results reveal a field that performs well on the visible half of the problem. At the international level, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, backed by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, encourages all-hazard management across all sectors, while the Paris Agreement targets the climate change that drives air pollution. International non-governmental organizations have pushed early action, from the Cameroon Red Cross prioritizing emergency preparedness to Emirates Nature-WWF in the United Arab Emirates promoting rapid air quality improvement and Fire and Emergency New Zealand responding quickly to pollution events. In developed countries, the United States has built hurricane and flood capability, with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 exposing the failures of fragmented all-hazard planning and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 demonstrating the payoff of prior planning, incident command systems, coordination, and leadership. European nations, despite the rarity of tropical systems there, have managed the health and social consequences of extratropical cyclones such as Vince in 2005 and subtropical storm Alpha in 2020, delivering humanitarian logistics from mental to physical health services.

Developing countries tell a parallel story centered on fire. Africa has been described as a wildfire continent, with roughly 70 percent of the 400 million hectares burned worldwide each year located in African savannas and grasslands, and those fires, many too small for satellite detection, disrupt the global atmosphere, carbon cycle, and ecosystems. South American nations including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, frequently threatened by heatwave- and drought-driven wildfires and major timber exporters besides, have invested in advanced weather technology and land-use planning, while Southeast Asian countries have long battled wildfires in the Lower Mekong Basin. Yet across all three stakeholder groups, the review finds, internal meteorological processes are managed only through improvised alternatives rather than systematic frameworks, leaving the underlying drivers of wind-related risk largely unexamined.

Why bother closing that gap? The review identifies three major benefits of genuine all-hazard management. First, it provides a robust reference for all stakeholders across every phase of the emergency management cycle, from prevention and preparedness through response and recovery. Second, it enables cooperation among stakeholders who otherwise work in silos, including governments, businesses, voluntary organizations, mass media, and local communities, building professional networks that hazard-specific management rarely achieves. Third, it accumulates disaster response capacity for local communities, a process that helped create the professional emergency management profession itself in the twenty-first century. Focusing only on visible risks, the paper warns, misses crucial opportunities for early detection, forecasting, prevention, and recovery. Wildfire research makes the point concretely: air stability, wind direction, and wind speed are key factors controlling ember movement, fire intensity, and fire spread, so monitoring those meteorological processes directly improves forecasts and emergency response before dangerous conditions fully materialize.

The policy implications are deliberately framed as directions to test rather than mandates to impose. Drawing on the principle of progressiveness from the Emergency Management Institute’s 2007 principles of disaster management, the review suggests that practitioners could use fine-scale wind direction patterns, wind-driven pollinator decline, and localized indigenous wind knowledge to identify subtle signals, anticipate cascading impacts, and inform early warning indicators. Emergency managers might assess whether micro-level wind direction data supports interagency collaboration during wind-related incidents; institutions could explore incorporating pollinator-wind interactions into climate adaptation and biodiversity monitoring; and local authorities might test whether indigenous wind knowledge strengthens land-use planning and community risk education. The author is explicit that these recommendations are complementary possibilities, not conclusions requiring immediate revision of the Sendai Framework or other international instruments, and that feasibility must be evaluated within existing risk assessment, early warning, and preparedness programs while accounting for different institutional capacities and regional hazard contexts.

The review also acknowledges its own limits. It did not explore the complex interrelationships between wind hazards and other natural or anthropogenic hazards, and language and accessibility constraints, including the exclusion of non-English publications and reliance on paywalled literature, may have underrepresented regions with different approaches to wind hazard management. Still, as what the author describes as a pioneering attempt to study all-wind-hazard management comprehensively, the paper offers a conceptual framework that connects climatology, disaster risk reduction, and emergency management from a single analytical viewpoint. The next steps it proposes are practical: tabletop exercises, seminars, drills, and eventually full-scale exercises that test whether incorporating both external hazards and internal meteorological processes improves coordination under broader wind-hazard scenarios. If those tests succeed, the humble daily movement of air, the same force that carries pollen between plants and shapes local winds known only to the communities that live with them, could finally take its place alongside the hurricane in the world’s disaster plans, reducing human loss, economic damage, and the mental stress that follows in the wake of every wind-driven catastrophe.

Subject of Research: All-hazard management of wind hazards and internal meteorological processes in disaster risk reduction

Article Title: All-hazard management approach for wind

Article References: Ha, K.-M. (2026). All-hazard management approach for wind. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 157(10), Article 624. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-026-06559-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00704-026-06559-3

Keywords: wind hazards, all-hazard management, disaster risk reduction, meteorology, climatology, emergency management, Sendai Framework, wildfires, hurricanes, air pollution, pollinator decline, resilience

The special issue assembles twelve studies examining disasters and their effects on older adults across the United States, Puerto Rico, and China, spanning home- and community-based care, assisted living communities, and nursing homes. Together, the research paints a picture of hazard exposure that is rarely limited to one event. Researchers trace how childhood adversity, extreme heat, air pollution, and multiple losses following hurricanes can shape cognitive function, mental health, and daily functioning decades later in life. Other studies document how disasters can cause sustained disruptions to home health and therapy services well beyond the central disaster zone, rippling outward through the networks of care that frail and homebound older adults depend upon daily. Still others reveal that pre-existing differences in staffing levels, organizational structure, and resident involvement leave assisted living communities and nursing homes unevenly prepared, meaning that two facilities in the same storm path may face radically different outcomes.

One of the most sobering findings highlighted in the editorial concerns persistent gaps in individual preparedness. Even older adults who live with chronic illness or who have lived through previous disasters may lack concrete plans for continuing medical care during a power outage or an evacuation. Devices such as oxygen concentrators, refrigerated medications, dialysis schedules, and mobility equipment all depend on infrastructure and logistics that fail precisely when disasters hit. Yet the research also identifies factors that strengthen preparedness and recovery: prior experience, resilience, hope, self-efficacy, caregiving relationships, and reliable access to information all emerge as protective resources. The editorial’s argument is that these modifiable factors can be deliberately cultivated by families, clinicians, and community organizations, rather than left to chance, and that doing so represents one of the most practical pathways to reducing harm in an era of intensifying climate-related hazards.

“Motivation alone is not enough,” said Peterson, of the University of South Florida School of Aging Studies. “Older adults need information that is timely, relevant, and meets their needs and life circumstances. And they need better support from all the organizations with a role in disaster planning and recovery, from emergency management and health care providers to home care, respite, and long-term care facilities.” The statement underscores a recurring theme across the special issue: preparedness campaigns that treat older adults as a homogeneous group, or that rely on generic checklists, fail to account for the enormous diversity of health status, living arrangement, caregiving situation, and geographic exposure found within the aging population itself. A rural older adult living alone with limited transportation faces a fundamentally different risk profile than a resident of a well-staffed urban nursing facility, and effective planning must reflect those differences.

The psychological dimension of disasters receives particular attention in the issue. “Disasters do not only threaten physical health. For older adults, they can cut people off from normal routines, relationships, and the caregivers they rely on. Those losses can have lasting psychological effects,” said special issue guest editor Lisa M. Brown, PhD, ABPP, of the Department of Clinical Psychology at Palo Alto University. “When preparedness includes mental health, caregiver support, and trauma-informed care, older adults—and the staff and families who care for them—will be better able to cope during a crisis and throughout recovery.” Brown’s framing points to a frequently overlooked mechanism of harm: the severing of social ties and daily routines that anchor cognitive and emotional stability in later life. For people living with dementia, the loss of familiar caregivers and environments during evacuation can accelerate decline, while the trauma of repeated evacuations can accumulate across successive storm seasons.

The third guest editor, David M. Dosa, MD, MPH, professor of medicine and chief of geriatrics at UMass Chan Medical School, emphasized the shared societal stakes of the research. “Disasters are apolitical events,” he said. “We must do our very best as a society to understand how best to prepare for and respond to disasters. Articles like the ones in this special issue can help us do just that and must be encouraged.” Dosa’s comment reflects a growing consensus among geriatricians and emergency management researchers that disaster science for older adults has historically been underfunded and fragmented, with lessons learned in one jurisdiction rarely translated into policy or practice elsewhere. The special issue is intended, in part, to consolidate evidence across settings and nations so that preparedness can become a systematic discipline rather than an improvised response.

Technically, the editorial points toward a set of concrete interventions. These include integrating disaster planning into routine clinical care, so that emergency medication supplies, power-dependency registries, and evacuation plans are established during ordinary medical visits rather than in the frantic hours before a storm. They also include building organizational capacity within assisted living communities and nursing homes, tailoring preparedness approaches to each facility’s geographic and structural vulnerabilities, and creating community-based programs that account for the full range of older adults’ circumstances, particularly in rural areas where emergency services are sparse and response times are long. The emphasis on organizational capacity reflects findings that facilities with stronger staffing, clearer chains of command, and greater resident involvement consistently fare better when hazards strike, suggesting that preparedness is as much an institutional property as an individual one.

Taken together, the twelve studies and the framing editorial deliver a clear analytical conclusion: disaster vulnerability in later life cannot be understood by examining a single event in isolation. Preparedness and recovery depend on the accumulation and interaction of prior experiences, health and social conditions, institutional capacity, geography, and access to trustworthy information. A hurricane that spares one older adult may devastate a neighbor with the same age but a different constellation of chronic illness, social isolation, and care arrangements. This systems-level view challenges the traditional emergency management model, which often treats affected populations as uniform and response as a short-term operation with a defined end point. For older adults, the research suggests, recovery may extend months or years, and the disruption of home health services far outside the disaster zone can be as consequential as the hazard itself.

The editorial also carries implications for policy at a moment when climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of heat waves, wildfires, and severe storms across the aging societies of North America and East Asia. Because the population aged sixty-five and older is growing rapidly in all three regions studied, the number of people exposed to complex emergencies will rise even if hazard frequency alone did not increase. Strengthening modifiable factors such as resilience, self-efficacy, caregiving relationships, and access to information, while simultaneously addressing gaps in the health care, home care, and long-term care systems on which older adults rely, offers communities a concrete agenda for improving safety and security before, during, and after disasters. The editorial, published in the Journal of Applied Gerontology, will be freely accessible in perpetuity, a decision that its authors hope will speed the translation of its findings into emergency management practice, clinical protocols, and community programs serving one of the most vulnerable populations in any disaster.

Subject of Research: Disaster preparedness and complex emergencies affecting older adult populations

Article Title: New editorial in special issue calls for stronger disaster preparedness for older adults

Article References: New editorial in special issue calls for stronger disaster preparedness for older adults. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: disaster preparedness, older adults, gerontology, Journal of Applied Gerontology, hurricanes, extreme heat, nursing homes, assisted living, mental health, climate-related hazards, long-term care, resilience

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 geographical setting is central to the story. Great Swan Island, roughly one by three kilometers with a maximum elevation of about 19 meters, and its rugged sister, Little Swan Island, separated by a channel only about 200 meters wide, together cover just 3.6 square kilometers. Today they host a small rotating Honduran naval garrison and no permanent civilian residents. But the archival record reveals layers of human presence stretching back at least to the seventeenth century. Shell middens containing burned top shells and crude pottery, reported by visitors in the 1930s, hint at possible pre-contact Indigenous visits, though the islands’ isolation and lack of permanent freshwater may have kept any occupation minimal. Christopher Columbus’s crew appears to have been the first European party to encounter the islands in July 1502 during his fourth voyage, and buccaneers including Henry Morgan and Captain Charles Swan—from whom the islands take their English name—used Great Swan Island as a staging base in the mid-to-late 1600s.

The authors conclude that from the pre-contact period through the early seventeenth century, the islands likely remained in a natural or near-natural state. In their pristine condition, the Swan Islands were probably completely cloaked in Caribbean coastal lowland dry forest, so dense that the naturalist Percy Lowe wrote in 1908 that trees came right down to the sea, allowing a visitor to step in five yards from the blinding glare of the beach into the gloom of the woods. Enormous seabird colonies of boobies, frigatebirds, and terns deposited the vast phosphate guano reserves that would later attract industrial exploitation. Green, hawksbill, and loggerhead turtles nested on the beaches in numbers unimaginable today, green iguanas were reportedly tame and abundant, and the reefs supported large predators including goliath groupers, sharks, snappers, and jacks, along with the grazing sea urchin Diadema antillarum and plentiful queen conch.

The pivotal rupture came in the 1850s. In 1857, phosphate-rich guano estimated at more than three million tons, yielding 40 to 80 percent bone phosphate of lime, was reported on the islands, triggering United States claims under the Guano Islands Act of 1856. From 1858, the Atlantic and Pacific Guano Company began clearing native forest on Great Swan Island to excavate the deposits, shipping the guano to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where it was blended with menhaden waste into fertilizer. At the operation’s peak in 1887, some 300 men worked the island, supported by a settlement of laborer housing, drying sheds, and a small railroad from the diggings to a western pier. Mining continued under various companies until 1904, leaving pits that persist today as ephemeral ponds. The deforestation almost certainly increased soil erosion and sediment runoff into nearshore waters, initiating a slow chain of marine degradation that would unfold over the following century and a half.

The human and biological toll compounded rapidly. Goats introduced from Grand Cayman grazed down native vegetation, and ships servicing the guano trade and later enterprises delivered rats, mice, and feral cats—predators that devastated seabird colonies, reptiles, and invertebrates. Commercial turtle hunting on an industrial scale was underway by the 1880s; an 1884 Baltimore Sun report described a superintendent freeing more than 300 turtles from holding pens because no vessels had come to buy them. That same article contains what appears to be the first published record of the Swan Island hutia, Geocapromys thoracatus, a small rodent found nowhere else on Earth. After mining ended, leaseholders and the United Fruit Company cleared more forest for a 7,500-tree coconut plantation, fruit crops, and tobacco, while a wireless telegraph station, a US Weather Bureau hurricane station, and later a cattle quarantine station and CIA radio facilities further reshaped the landscape. By 1908, Lowe recorded seabirds nesting only on Little Swan Island, the rookeries of Great Swan having evidently already been extirpated.

The twentieth century catalogued a cascade of extinctions. The endemic whiptail lizard Ameiva fuliginosa, collected in 1887, vanished by 1912, apparently a casualty of cat predation. The islands’ remarkable land snail fauna—23 described species, at least nine endemic—was abundant as late as 1937 but apparently collapsed completely soon afterward, most likely under sustained rat predation. The Swan Island hutia, abundant on Little Swan Island into the early 1950s, went extinct by 1960, a demise researchers attribute to feral cat predation compounded by the catastrophic Category 5 Hurricane Janet in 1955, whose deluge likely drowned animals sheltering in limestone crevices. The endemic Little Swan Island racer snake Cubophis brooksi has not been reliably seen since the late 1990s. Only the green iguanas persisted in force; a 2024 survey estimated 18,000 to 20,000 animals on Great Swan Island, though unlike the tame populations Lowe described, they now flee humans, an apparent behavioral legacy of decades of hunting.

The marine story follows a parallel, delayed trajectory. As late as 2000, the reefs surrounding the islands were still reported as reasonably healthy, with large predatory fish and four shark species present—remarkably late by Caribbean standards, where reef decline generally began decades earlier. Yet the archival synthesis reveals that between 2007 and 2011/13, the reefs underwent a dramatic phase shift. The first quantitative surveys, conducted in 2011 and 2013, found most coral reduced to rubble, with average live coral cover of only about 13 percent in 2011 and 10 percent in 2013, while macroalgae blanketed roughly a third of the reef surface. Predatory fish and sharks had become very rare. Surveys in 2024 showed little recovery, with live coral dominated by weedy, disturbance-tolerant species such as Siderastrea siderea and Porites astreoides, and only three small, bleaching colonies of staghorn coral remaining.

The researchers identify a convergence of stressors that likely pushed the reefs past a tipping point after 2007. These include more than a century and a half of land-use change and sedimentation; the collapse of seabird populations, which historically transported marine-derived nutrients from ocean to island and back into nearshore waters, boosting reef productivity and resilience; the loss of nesting sea turtles, which function as ecosystem engineers grazing seagrass and consuming reef sponges; sustained overfishing of herbivorous and predatory fish; the regional spread of white-band disease; the catastrophic 1983–84 mass mortality of the grazing urchin Diadema antillarum, which removed up to 85 to 90 percent of Caribbean populations; the arrival of invasive lionfish in the early 2000s; and warming-driven coral bleaching. Critically, NOAA hurricane records show that four intense Category 4 and 5 storms—Mitch in 1998, Iris in 2001, Wilma in 2005, and Dean in 2007—struck within a nine-year window, with return intervals of three, four, and less than two years, far too short for reefs already weakened by chronic stress to recover.

The study’s implications extend beyond historical curiosity. The Swan Islands sit within one of the Caribbean’s largest marine protected areas, declared a national marine park in 1991 and encompassing roughly 5,672 square kilometers of ocean, yet the reserve remains largely unmanaged. The authors argue that historical ecological knowledge is essential both for dispelling the persistent myth that the islands are pristine—as recent tourism and promotional materials still claim—and for setting realistic restoration benchmarks. They advocate a holistic ridge-to-reef strategy, noting that coral restoration efforts are likely to fail unless paired with terrestrial management, invasive species control, and the recovery of seabird and turtle populations that sustain land-sea nutrient connections. Recent development proposals, including a planned maximum-security prison on Great Swan Island that was cancelled in 2023 amid financial and environmental concerns, underscore the stakes. The Swan Islands, the authors conclude, now stand as a powerful model system for understanding how remoteness delays but does not prevent ecological collapse, and for designing restoration strategies grounded in the deep history of what these islands once were.

Subject of Research: Long-term anthropogenic ecological change on the Swan Islands in the western Caribbean

Article Title: Historical ecology of the Swan Islands (Islas del Cisne) chronicles long-term anthropogenic changes in the Western Caribbean

Article References: Mladenov, P. V., & Fitzpatrick, S. M. (2026). Historical ecology of the Swan Islands (Islas del Cisne) chronicles long-term anthropogenic changes in the Western Caribbean. Discover Ecology, 2(1), Article 23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44396-026-00036-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44396-026-00036-x

Keywords: Swan Islands, historical ecology, coral reefs, invasive species, guano mining, seabirds, sea turtles, hurricanes, Caribbean, biodiversity loss, island restoration, Honduras