Community Engagement for Extreme Weather and Society: Using Geospatial Approaches for People, Place and Health

In 2015 and 2016 a number of extreme weather records were set.  Global temperatures have warmed by 1.0 degree Celsius/1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, and many communities have experienced extreme heat, destructive storms, flooding and sea-level rise. Climatic changes continue to fuel extreme weather around the globe. Extreme weather is impacting people and places globally more than in the past.  Environmental and social shifts result due to changing and often severe weather patterns with intense impacts on rural, urban, suburban communities as local infrastructure, mobility, cities and towns are experiencing changes to their physical environments. These physical changes in turn produce alterations to the way that people engage with the natural environment.

 A major challenge facing scientists today is how to actively engage with communities experiencing environmental changes due to extreme weather.  Successful engagement must occur in a way that fits with local culture and that is appropriate for a particular geography and population. For instance, in many rural places communication happens through the radio. In more urban communities such communication may best occur through cellphones. Different forms of communication and engagement occur in various places. The most effective types of communication and engagement are based on careful consideration of racial, ethnic, political and economic characteristics that build a strategy based on analysis and understanding of such features and classes of information.  One means to develop such an understanding is through use of geospatial analysis approaches to enable the layers of various feature-type information about communities to be brought together in one place. This coupled with the ground-truthing of the data and information, will help to create place-based communication strategies that fit the local population and their communication abilities, patterns and local technology. We illustrate how geospatial approaches to gather and analyze data can help to better understand people in the context of place.  Using GIS helps to incorporate knowledge, data and perspectives of social scientists and local communities into the weather/science planning process so that more appropriate communication and engagement strategies can be developed.