Professor offers strategies for enhancing hurricane resilience

Sam Brody

Sam Brody

Communities can improve their hurricane resilience by better protecting wetlands, diversifying their respective economies and building networks of communication with socially vulnerable groups, such as the elderly and the poor, said Sam Brody, Texas A&M professor of urban planning, in the Summer/Fall 2013 issue of [Texas Shores] (http://texas-sea-grant.tamu.edu/NewsAndEvents/TexasShores.html) magazine.

Brody, who also heads the [Institute for Sustainable Coastal Communities] (http://www.tamug.edu/iscc/) , a joint initiative between the College of Architecture and Texas A&M University at Galveston, added that public resilience measures taking place on the Texas coast are ad hoc and uncoordinated.

“We’re still putting people into clearly flood-prone areas, and the average resident is just not aware of the risk,” he said. “The message is just not getting through.”

Brody has a joint appointment to the [Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning] (http://laup.arch.tamu.edu/) at Texas A&M University and the Department of Marine Sciences at TAMUG, where he holds of the George P. Mitchell ’40 Chair in Sustainable Coasts.

He was quoted in Texas Shores, the award-winning magazine published by Texas Sea Grant, a research center in Texas A&M’s College of Geosciences.

posted December 4, 2013