United States Federal Emergency Management Agency regional clustering by disaster exposure: a new paradigm for disaster response

Abstract

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) divides the United States (US) into ten standard regions to promote local partnerships and priorities. These divisions, while longstanding, do not adequately address known hazard risk as reflected in past federal disaster declarations. From FEMA’s inception in 1979 until 2020, the OpenFEMA dataset reports 4127 natural disaster incidents declared by 53 distinct state-level jurisdictions, listed by disaster location, type, and year. An unsupervised spectral clustering (SC) algorithm was applied to group these jurisdictions into regions based on affinity scores assigned to each pair of jurisdictions accounting for both geographic proximity and historical disaster exposures. Reassigning jurisdictions to ten regions using the proposed SC algorithm resulted in an adjusted Rand index (ARI) of 0.43 when compared with the existing FEMA regional structure, indicating little similarity between the current FEMA regions and the clustering results. Reassigning instead into six regions substantially improved cluster quality with a maximized silhouette score of 0.42, compared to a score of 0.34 for ten regions. In clustering US jurisdictions not only by geographic proximity but also by the myriad hazards faced in relation to one another, this study demonstrates a novel method for FEMA regional allocation and design that may ultimately improve FEMA disaster specialization and response.

Searching for a sustainable solution to increasing chemical pollution

“…In practice, however, emergency planning has rarely taken climate change into account (Arnell 2022 ). Solutions adapted to local or regional conditions operate in, e.g., China (Spencer et al 2019 ), India, the USA, and European Union (Margus et al 2023 ). But climate change is an ongoing process, so preparation for its consequences should be ongoing.…”

“…Human civilization is exposed to various natural hazards that can cause disasters classified according to the type of trigger (Provitolo 2009;Caldera and Wirasinghe 2022). A disaster is a major disruption to a community that causes widespread human, economic, or environmental loss and impacts that exceed the ability of the affected community to recover from its resources (Somasundaram et al 2007;Margus et al 2023).…”