Research Overview
The Intersection of Community Resilience and Climate Justice Across Unique Ecologies
What Barriers to Adaptation is Your Community Facing?
To address socio-ecological challenges, my approach focuses on “deep engagement” to ensure that all voices are heard and involved in planning and adaptation processes. Through this engagement, it is possible to recognize unique contexts for adaptation within underserved populations, improve participation in planning processes, and avoid unequal distributions of the negative impacts associated with natural hazards. Projects begin with immersion in target communities to build trust and working relationships with local stakeholders, government officials, and NGOs while collecting preliminary qualitative data through semi-structured interviews. Then, with an understanding of local perceptions and terminology for addressing threats, adaptation, and resilience, I work to design frameworks for more broadly evaluating perceptions. Through meeting facilitation, either in the form of focus groups or community forums, I will then test and refine a research framework to ensure its utility for identifying and removing barriers to adaptation and to ultimately foster dialogue for building adaptive capacity. Finally, with a refined framework, I utilize survey research to broadly capture perceptions across a landscape to build psychological models for understanding stakeholder needs to critique and inform policy development.
