institute for sustainable communities

Municipalities are more responsive to natural disaster plans that focus on a single threat, such as flooding, than they are to comprehensive resiliency strategies, according to a study evaluating how U.S. cities are adapting to the impacts of climate change.

As tens of thousands of Texans undergo a long, difficult recovery from Hurricane Harvey, numerous faculty and students initiatives at Texas A&M University are helping individuals and communities learn how to emerge from the damage and mitigate the effects of future disasters.

Houston's growth has created a city at risk to devastating floods, said Sam Brody, a flood impact expert and professor of urban planning at Texas A&M, in a June 16, 2017 article in The Guardian, where he said “it’s not if, but when” a natural disaster will strike the metropolis.

After each heavy rain last spring on the streets of an impoverished, east Houston industrial neighborhood, students from nearby Furr High School trained by Texas A&M graduate planning students mapped and tested the toxicity of storm floodwaters.

Yu Xiao, an associate professor at Texas A&M, tells the public what urban planning is, and how planners’ work affects the built environment and society in “Planning and Design,” a podcast she hosts.

Extreme rainfall events in Houston like the April 18, 2016 deluge will become more frequent in the future according to a study conducted for the Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project, an interdisciplinary research initiative at Texas A&M.

Urban planners can assess whether a community’s hazard plans target its most vulnerable areas with a scorecard developed in part by planning researchers at Texas A&M.

Phil Berke, professor of urban planning, and Jennifer Horney, Texas A&M associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, are conducting research to raise community resilience to natural disasters.

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.

The National Academy of Environmental Design is getting a boost in its efforts to advocate sustainable design and environmental stewardship from Phil Berke, one of the nation’s foremost land use planning experts and professor of urban planning.

Philip Berke ‘81, widely regarded as one of the nation’s top land use planning scholars, is returning to Texas A&M in 2014 to rejoin the urban planning faculty and help lead the university’s Institute for Sustainable Coastal Communities.