COLLABORATIVE WORKFORCE TRAINING IN GEOSCIENCE AND SOCIAL SCIENCE FOR NATURAL-HAZARDS PREPAREDNESS AND MITIGATION (HAZPM)

Natural hazards pose risks to humanity, institutions, and infrastructure. These risks are rendered more extreme, more complex, and more difficult to manage by global climate change. Recent extreme events such as Hurricanes Irma and Maria, and massive western wildfires reveal a need for a more robust system of preparation for and mitigation of natural hazards at the state and national level. This is a problem for natural scientists, engineers, and social scientists alike, as hazards originate and occur in the interfaces between natural systems and societies. Research shows that better-educated societies with better-educated decision-makers are best equipped to prepare for, mitigate, and recover from natural disasters. The NSF-funded HazPM project has the goal of designing and implementing an undergraduate workforce-training program that integrates the natural and social sciences from start to finish. We seek to fully characterize the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required of graduates who will enter the natural-hazards workforce, and foster these in students by means of a certificate program accessible and professionally useful to hazards-minded students majoring in geoscience and other natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, planning, sustainability, and many other fields.

We are conducting field ethnographic studies (focus groups, structured surveys, and formal interviews) with collaborators in a study population comprising professionals from a broad range of local, state, and tribal agencies and private organizations engaged in natural-hazards preparation and mitigation in Arizona and the Southwest US, as well as a textual analysis of published job advertisements relating to natural hazards in the same region. Our preliminary results indicate a strong expectation that new workers have knowledge of specific hazards (e.g., floods, mass wasting, wildfires), expertise in coding and GIS, skill in communication, and the capacity to function in highly regulated and bureaucratic systems. We will discuss these results and outline the follow-on plan to work with faculty at regional two-year and four-year colleges to formulate a certificate program that serves both.