coastal systems

Texas A&M’s national prominence in disaster planning research is evidenced in the February 2015 Journal of the American Planning Association special issue in which four of the publication’s 10 articles were penned by Texas A&M faculty and former students.

Clint Brown ’78, director of software products at Esri, the world’s leading developer of geographic information system applications, will keynote Texas A&M’s GIS Day festivities 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18 in Memorial Student Center Room 2300E.

The Sea Grant Program at Texas A&M have teamed up with the university's Institute for Applied Creativity to produce videos that illuminate important issues related to weather, water and climate change in Texas.

GIS Day, the worldwide salute to geospatial technology and its power to transform and enhance lives, is going to be extra “spatial” this year in Aggieland, where the Texas A&M celebration is expanding to encompass three event-packed days, Nov. 17–19.

Procedures to create resilient communities — places that avoid, absorb and recover quickly from natural disasters — are detailed in a new book co-authored by four urban planning educators at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture.

“Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek,” a documentary chronicling a decade-long struggle of Gulfport, Miss. residents to stop a land development project threatening their neighborhood, will be screened at 5 p.m., Oct. 22, in Evans Library Annex.

To contend with the rapidly escalating threat of coastal flooding, government agencies need to adopt a new, fundamentally different strategy focused on flood prevention rather than recovery, according to a recent National Research Council report.

Toxic waste pits along the San Jacinto River in far east Harris County containing dioxin and other hazardous substances are a “loaded gun” threatening human health and the environment, said Sam Brody, professor of urban planning at Texas A&M University.

To mark 25 years of disaster-related research at Texas A&M University, many of the nation’s top hazard researchers are gathering on campus April 4-5 to present their latest work as part of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center’s “Planning for Disaster Resilience Symposium.”

Communities can improve their hurricane resilience by better protecting wetlands, diversifying their respective economies and building communication networks for socially vulnerable groups, said Sam Brody, Texas A&M professor of urban planning.

Last summer, Texas A&M hazard mitigation researchers partnered with their Dutch counterparts at Delft University in The Netherlands to developed a joint research agenda to combat a common enemy — flooding.

Though natural and man-made disasters are inevitable, scientists at the Texas A&M College of Architecture are working on ways to minimize their impact, hasten recovery and gain valuable insight from the process.

The 100-year floodplain, a longstanding metric for determining the chance of an area’s inundation by flood waters, appears to be an inaccurate measure for predicting potential flood-related loss, said Samuel Brody, professor of urban planning at Texas A&M.

Ranked as one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S., groundwater-dependent Montgomery County, Texas is confronted with a looming water crisis threatening future growth, according to a study by urban planners at Texas A&M University.