Ongoing Research Projects
Environmental Displacement
Natural disasters displace people from their homes in ways not uniform across the affected population. Who leaves and when, and who can return reflect resources available to populations and government disaster management programs. Patterns of displacement and resettlement can have lasting effects on households and communities in terms of exposure to future harm.
This project investigates the ways that neighborhood compositions change following extreme weather events and the consequences of differential displacement experiences.
Displacement Monitoring
Satellite data offer an opportunity to augment ground-collected data to identify the receiving locations of displaced populations, target intervention in these areas, and monitor environmental stressors in host communities and settlements.
We are investigating the use of remotely sensed data from different satellites to determine the size and location of displaced populations and to develop early warning systems for environmental hazards to displaced populations.
Agriculture
Climate change, through its effects on precipitation, temperature, and storm severity, threatens the food security for subsistence farmers and rural communities throughout the world.
As part of Columbia University’s ACToday project, we are using climate information to improve the security of national food systems through risk identification and reduction and targeted aid interventions.
Food Security
The interconnected nature of the global food system can serve to increase food security by increasing the availability of food through trade. In the same way, however, it exposes populations to distant shocks in food production affecting a country’s trading partners.
Using a model of global food trade, we simulate how shocks to food production in a single country or set of countries may propagate through the global food system.
