Flood Insurance and Catastrophe

Flood insurance is not something that many homeowners have, but they don’t necessarily know that they don’t have it. This is because flood protection is not a part of a conventional homeowners insurance policy. Most homeowners have to have insurance protection due to the provisions of their mortgage, but few people take the time to understand their policy and what protections it offers. As such, many people are often left at the mercy of natural disasters…

Don’t Forget About Governance: The Risk of Tunnel Vision in Chasing Resilience for Asia’s Cities

Asia is going through an unprecedented wave of urbanization. Secondary and tertiary cities are seeing the most rapid changes in land-use and ownership, social structures, and values as peri-urban and agricultural land become part of metropolitan cityscapes. All the while, climate change is making many of these fast-growing cities more vulnerable to disasters…

3 ways to boost your resilience

Resilience seems to be a buzzword these days in the legal world. Law firms and bar associations appear more focused than ever on helping lawyers develop enhanced resilience. (I have been asked to address this topic specifically in my lawyer wellness workshops twice in the past month alone.) Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties or setbacks. Since difficulties and setbacks are abundant in the practice of law, greater resilience can be a big asset for lawyers…

Poorest communities are least resilient to weather extremes – study

As extreme weather events likely connected to the planet’s warming climate become increasingly common, low-income communities are positioned to suffer the worst consequences during the aftermath of natural disasters, write the authors of a report from the Center for American Progress called “One Storm Shy of Despair.” “These communities are simply more vulnerable and much more at risk to the impacts of climate change,” Cathleen Kelly, a senior fellow at CAP and one of the report’s authors, said of the difficulties residents in poorer neighborhoods face after natural disasters. “A family already struggling financially might just be completely derailed.”..

Drones Could Be Used to Find Missing Persons After Natural Disasters

“The drone’s WiFi antenna could be replaced by Avalanche Victim Detectors which would enable the rapid and inexpensive deployment of the first avalanche searches,” Jonathan Cheseaux, a student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, said. As an amateur mountaineer Cheseaux realized that most people, even those climbing the sides of mountains or the majority of the population in some of the world’s poorest countries carry cellphones, and that their signals could be used to track survivors after a natural disaster…