Beth has an incredible breadth of experience in both studying and direct fieldwork on building resilience in vulnerable, low-income communities to disasters like hurricanes and floods and other climate disasters.  Can you tell us a bit about your career path from fieldwork into academic research?

Beth described her journey as winding, but Anita saw it as a deepening over time toward finding the core problems that give rise to disasters.  Beth started out as a pre-med doing investigative medicine, but she was mentored (and Beth is great at mentoring and being mentored!) to look at public-health for solutions to problems.  She ended up at Boston University studying public health solutions to disaster recover.  Working in Haiti, she realized through her work with beloved colleagues that disaster response occurred before disasters actually occurred in the sense that a community’s cohesion drove its resource response.   Believing that companies were great at resource allocation, she pursued an MBA, but then found out that we don’t know as much as necessary about disaster resilience.  That’s how she got to where she is today….  She’s still working on the same problems, looking to climb the mountain behind the mountain so that we can respond to disasters at scale before they happen.

Your newest paper on building resilience in Zambian communities brings up several themes that you raise in some of your earlier work, such as on traumatized refugees.  What does it take to build resilience to disaster?

Beth explained that disaster response occurs in stages:  immediate, short-term and long-term.  And the challenge for communities is to build back during the long-term response so that the steady state is stronger than it was before the disaster occurred.   This is nothing to take for granted.   It’s easy to think of examples of disasters that permanently devasted their communities.  What Beth focused on in Zambia was on how communities became more resilient to future disasters through their responses particularly to the COVID pandemic.   In a recent paper (available through the link in the notes), she and her co-author document how Tribal Textiles, an NGO working in the country, moved from orchestrating the provision of locally sewn textiles to tourists into making masks for the export market.   And how this organization worked with dormant Safari operators to use stabled trucks for mask delivery to port cities.  The creative resilience of the community – even a very low-income community – arose from the strength of the shared commitment to mutual safety among its members.

Do you see technologies emerging for building physical structures – and the communities in which they are embedded – that make you hopeful?

Beth described a different study in which she examined how a community called SerenBe south of Atlanta was designed and built under agreements to Transfer Property Rights for mental health, environmental preservation, and collective resilience to climate challenges.   The goal was resilience in the build environment.  During the pandemic, what mattered was access to nature and the mental-health benefits that cultivates.   

What does Beth want us to consider?

Both physical and community resources are important to our resilience to the climate emergency.  In the end, it is our commitment to each other – in community – that keeps us strong.