By Megan Lowry

Today, communities across Louisiana and Southeastern coasts are emerging from the shadow of Hurricane Ida. The storm has left New Orleans without power, surrounding areas flooded, and thousands evacuated from their homes.

Since Hurricane Katrina swept through Louisiana almost exactly 16 years ago, the National Academies have helped produce scientific insights and recommendations through initiatives such as the Resilient America Program to help policymakers avoid the worst impacts of future disasters — addressing questions like: How can we improve hurricane prediction? How can cities and states better manage evacuations? How can we make sure the electrical grid is ready for increasingly intense storms?

August 31, 2021; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

By: Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience

This handbook companion document supports Public Information and Warnings (AIDR 2021) and provides guidance on the elements of the Australian Warning System.

The role of warnings in a public information and warning context is to provide point-in-time information about a hazard that is impacting or is expected to impact communities. It describes the impact and expected consequences for communities and includes advice on what people should do.

Previously, there have been different warning systems for different hazard types across Australia. The Australian Warning System was adopted by ANZEMC in March 2021 and aims to provide a consistent warnings approach to Australian communities.

The system is a three-level scaled warning system and includes a nationally consistent set of hazard icons for each warning level to show warnings on various publishing platforms (e.g. websites and apps) and provides calls to action. There are icons for cyclone, bushfire, flood, extreme heat, storm, and other. There is a consistent shape and colour scheme, with icons increasing in size as the warning level increases.

Each warning level is to be combined with an action statement to give the community clearer advice about what to do. Calls to action can be used flexibly across all three warning levels and contextualised for each hazard within each state or territory.

The system builds on existing warning frameworks and applies to bushfire, flood, severe storm, cyclone and extreme heat – but is designed to be adaptable and scalable to other hazards.

(AIDR 2021)

By: W. C. Arthur

The 2018 Tropical Cyclone Hazard Assessment (TCHA18) provides an evaluation of the likelihood and intensity (“how big and how often”) of the occurrence of tropical cyclone winds across the Australian region, covering mainland Australia, islands and adjacent waters. It is a probabilistic evaluation of the expected maximum gust wind speeds with a range of annual exceedance probabilities (or conversely, average recurrence intervals). The assessment is derived using a statistical-parametric model developed by Geoscience Australia called the Tropical Cyclone Risk Model (TCRM). Maximum 0.2-second duration, 10-metre above ground wind speeds are calculated for Standard Australia's AS/NZS 1170.2 (2011) terrain category 2 (0.02 m roughness length) surface conditions, over a 0.02 degree grid across Australia. Maps of average recurrence interval (ARI) wind speeds of 100- and 500-year ARI are provided in a separate product suite.

Geoscience Australia, Canberra. http://dx.doi.org/10.11636/Record.2018.040

By: Jane Sexton, Michael Tait, Heidi Turner, Craig Arthur, David Henderson, Mark Edwards

Ask a Queenslander where tropical cyclones occur and the inevitable response will be, North Queensland. While most of the tropical cyclones have made landfall north of Bundaberg, the cascading and concurrent effects are felt much further afield. The major flooding following Tropical Cyclone Yasi in 2011 and Tropical Cyclone Debbie in 2017 are 2 examples where impacts were felt across the state, and the damage to the banana plantation following Tropical Cyclone Larry (2006) was felt nationally. Acknowledging that climate is influencing the intensity and frequency of intense severe weather hazards, understanding how tropical cyclone hazard varies under future climate conditions is critical to risk-based planning in Queensland. With this climate influence, along with increasing population and more vulnerable building design in South East Queensland (relative to northern Queensland), there is an urgent need to assess the wind risk and set in place plans to reduce the effects of a potential tropical cyclone in South East Queensland.

AJEM 38:4, October 2023, pages 33-39.

By Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney Lopez, and Jonathan Simon

Since the 1970s, Americans have witnessed a pyrrhic war on crime, with sobering numbers at once chilling and cautionary. Our imprisoned population has increased five-fold, with a commensurate spike in fiscal costs that many now see as unsupportable into the future. As American society confronts a multitude of new challenges ranging from terrorism to the disappearance of middle-class jobs to global warming, the war on crime may be up for reconsideration for the first time in a generation or more. Relatively low crime rates indicate that the public mood may be swinging toward declaring victory and moving on.
However, to declare that the war is over is dangerous and inaccurate, and After the War on Crime reveals that the impact of this war reaches far beyond statistics; simply moving on is impossible. The war has been most devastating to those affected by increased rates and longer terms of incarceration, but its reach has also reshaped a sweeping range of social institutions, including law enforcement, politics, schooling, healthcare, and social welfare. The war has also profoundly altered conceptions of race and community.
It is time to consider the tasks reconstruction must tackle. To do so requires first a critical assessment of how this war has remade our society, and then creative thinking about how government, foundations, communities, and activists should respond. After the War on Crime accelerates this reassessment with original essays by a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars as well as policy professionals and community activists. The volume's immediate goal is to spark a fresh conversation about the war on crime and its consequences; its long-term aspiration is to develop a clear understanding of how we got here and of where we should go.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2008.256p

By The Pelican Institute

This year, disturbing reports of increased crime have dominated the news, both in Louisiana and nationally.

Crime is a serious issue that demands thoughtful solutions to deter criminal behavior and promote public safety. They should be guided by data and evidence, not anecdotes. That’s why Pelican set out to review and better understand the underlying data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report and Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Comparing Louisiana’s crime data with other states paints a complete picture of the scale of the problem and its potential causes.

New Orleans LA: Pelican Institute. 2022, 12pg