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After a natural disaster, private aid groups spring into action, helping Americans recover from tornadoes, floods and other calamities. But could these groups help long-term, post-disaster housing recovery more effectively?

Real progress is being made by Texas A&M urban planning faculty to help communities better prepare for and recover from natural disasters.

Hailed as “an extraordinary contribution to the hazard and disaster planning field,” a new book edited by Michael Lindell, professor emeritus of urban planning, emphasizes the importance of combining urban planning and hazard mitigation.

The Master of Urban Planning program at Texas A&M has vaulted into the upper echelon of programs of its kind in new rankings published by Planetizen, an independent, online platform that reports urban planning news and resources.

Leading campus disaster recovery and hazard scholars will explore recent and ongoing research on Hurricane Harvey and disaster resilience at Resilience Rising: Research and Practice on Harvey and Hazards of the Future Sept. 5-6 at Texas A&M’s Rudder Tower.

One of the nation’s premier hazard research hubs, the Texas A&M Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, will continue focusing on disaster preparedness, mitigation and recovery with its new director Michelle Meyer, assistant professor of urban planning.

Seemingly rational choices, made in the wake of natural disasters, can produce unsound results due to “uncanny wisdom,” a term, coined by a Texas A&M urban planning professor, describing actions that eventually exacerbate problems they were meant to solve.

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, two Texas A&M groups have teamed up to launch the Community Resilience Collaborative, a program aimed at bolstering the resilience of the state’s coastal communities to natural hazards and at restoring their habitats and ecosystems.

Editor’s note: Texas lawmakers heard Shannon Van Zandt, professor of urban planning, describe the significant housing difficulties low-and moderate-income people face as they recover from devastation caused by August 2017’s Hurricane Harvey.

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.

As Harvey’s record-setting rainfall inundated coastal Texas, expert researchers in natural disaster planning, recovery and sustainability at Texas A&M, through analysis and numerous media interviews, described how land development practices exacerbated the flooding and prescribed actions to mitigate future disasters.

Walter Gillis Peacock, director of the Texas A&M Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, is one of 15 experts serving on a committee established by Congress to review efforts to reduce life and property loss from windstorms, the nation’s costliest natural hazard.

City planning staff in Norfolk, Va., a coastal city of 243,000, have identified weaknesses and inconsistencies in their community’s natural hazard plans with a scorecard developed in part by Texas A&M disaster researchers.

Texas A&M University researchers are collaborating on an NSF initiative aimed at identifying links between the U.S. food distribution system and the nation’s energy, water and transportation networks that are most likely to be disrupted in a natural disaster.