Texas A&M University at Galveston’s Dr. Ashley Ross Has Disaster on the Mind
Research from Associate Professor of Marine and Coastal Environmental Science is redefining how communities prepare for and withstand disasters
Catastrophic storms severe flooding, extreme wildfires, and unpreceded winter events are unfolding with greater force and frequency across the globe. From Texas to Brazil, from California to the Mid-Atlantic natural disasters continue to dominate headlines and reshape entire communities.
At Texas A&M University at Galveston, Dr. Ashley Ross, associate professor of Marine and Coastal Environmental Science, leads the research focused on understanding how individuals, households, and communities can strengthen resilient in the face of escalating hazards. Disaster resilience —one of the most urgent challenges of our time—extends well beyond preparedness. Resilience examines how risk is reduced, how communities mobilize, and how recovery accelerates after a disruptive event.
“The concept of disaster resilience is important because it has a lot of promise and potential. It also encompasses more than preparedness, which is just being ready for an event happening where resilience is thinking more proactively about risk and how to reduce that risk, whether that’s a household or a community,” said Dr. Ross. “When events happen, emergencies or major disasters, how to proactively respond and recover from them is resilience. So, this term and phenomena encompasses what it takes to mobilize and unite people across different sectors and communities.”
As a Political Scientist, Dr. Ross was not always focused on disasters. In fact, her work in disaster resilience came about due to a collision of events involving a travel ban and an oil spill.
“I started studying disasters right out of graduate school because I needed to pivot,” Dr. Ross said. “I had been studying local governments and doing field work in Mexico. And at the time there was a ban on travel due to drug wars. And I knew that it wasn’t going to be feasible for me to continue the same research I had been doing.”
While the door to her field work in Mexico was closed, Ross saw another door open as she began working at Texas A&M Corpus Christi.
“When I arrived in Corpus Christi, I thought, why don’t I study something in my backyard and give back to the community that I’m now part of?,” Ross said. “And the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill happened the same year that I finished my PhD, and it felt like a natural pivot to start studying local governments and local communities in the Gulf Coast in relation to disasters. And once I started it, there was no looking back because it was incredibly rewarding. As a Gulf Coast resident, I know the value of studying disasters and making the future more resilient.”
Although much of Dr. Ross’ research has been Gulf Coast based, there is no single solution to address disaster resilience in every community in the region. Instead of a one size fits all approach, tailoring a response to a community is based on a myriad factors.
“Every community has different challenges and strengths and different ways to prepare for disasters and build their resilience,” Dr. Ross said. “One common way that resilience is studied is the capitals framework. Capitals are resources, and they can be sorted into different types—financial capital deals with the wealth of a community and diversity of its economy while physical capital refers to its built systems, roads, infrastructure, hospitals, schools. Natural capital includes the environmental resources that contribute to a community’s well-being. On the people side, there is social capital, which involves relationships, trust, and collaboration between people, and human capital, which is how mobilized the community can be in terms of their education, experience, and knowledge. Finally, institutional capital deals with how people relate to their government and how that government of the community relates to other governments to get things done.”
Finding a way to best use all the different types of capital is at the heart of building up resilience to disaster. While that may sound like a simple equation on paper, a plethora of challenges can arise once the issue is taken from theory to practice.
“Researchers for decades have quantified these things, so we can measure them. But we also see it in emergent behavior,” Dr. Ross said. “For example, a small, rural community that I engaged with after Hurricane Harvey didn’t have deep institutional or financial capital, but the people knew each other well. And the agriculture community, in particular, was really strong and active in helping the whole community respond to the event, showing up with large equipment that wasn’t available yet by other means. People just came together to help one another clear debris, tarp their roofs, find suitable shelter, and get a warm meal. That’s often what we see—some communities have strengths in some areas and capacity gaps in others. My research assesses what those are and how can we improve upon those gaps to make communities stronger as a whole.”
Dr. Ross notes that while having a disaster kit and knowing evacuation routes are important to be prepared for disasters, building resilience involves more.
“Resilience is more about being an engaged citizen and being tapped into your community, not just local government, but community groups and organizations, your children’s school, maybe recreational groups. Making those connections is critical because at the end of the day, those are the connections that we need to facilitate community ties that support proactive thinking to reduce risk and, when a disaster happens, to support long term recovery,” Dr. Ross said. “We can’t engineer our way out of everything in terms of reducing risk, but we can work together in really creative ways to reduce our risk and couple that with structural defenses to natural hazards like flooding and storm surge.”
Dr. Ross notes that being tapped into where you live and identifying the risks that your household faces, along with risks that your neighborhood faces is a critical element.
“All of us, no matter if we’re living here on the island of Galveston or further inland, or in a completely different region and state, are facing natural hazards—and they’re escalating,” Dr. Ross said. “So, we have to have these conversations to make our communities safer and less exposed to risk and to build a better future.”
Becoming more disaster resilient also involves shifting certain long held narratives on what disaster resilience looks like.
“In my very first project on resilience, I traveled all over the Gulf Coast one summer with a project funded by the Department of Homeland Security to interview emergency managers. And what I found was that emergency managers in small communities often perceived resilience as self-reliance. In many places, especially those that are more geographically isolated, that remains a predominant way of thinking about resilience that you need to be able to withstand and then deal with the aftermath of a disaster event on your own. But, today, that may be a misunderstanding.”
While the idea of self-reliance is prevalent, Dr. Ross notes that not only does it seem outdated, but it is also not the best approach to take.
“Disasters and the natural hazards that cause them are today much more severe, much more intense. Added to that is the complexity of how these hazards interact with growing, often sprawling, urban development. Flood plains are shifting, stormwater runoff is changing its direction and behavior, and vulnerable communities are more exposed. It’s not always in someone’s individual hands to deal with this risk,” Dr. Ross said. “I think that it’s much more productive to talk about these things in the collective and as communities so that we can deal with the root of these complex problems, not just deal with the current symptoms.”
The messaging that occurs during a disaster can often make the difference between life and death. Ensuring that communication about steps to take during the disaster are clear and followed is another aspect of Dr. Ross’ research. Working with colleagues at the University of North Texas on a project funded by the Texas One Gulf, Dr. Ross and the team are looking into the impacts that social media has in crisis and risk communication messaging during disasters.
“In the past several years, communication has changed. Since COVID, people are much more online. A majority of American adults get their news and information from social media platforms. Not all of these are trustworthy sources, and facts are often masked with opinion and misinformation,” Dr. Ross said. “In this study, we’re asking—in today’s information environment, what is going on with risk communication, and do we need to revise our protocols around it? We don’t have a complete answer to that yet. But so far, the emergency managers that we’ve interviewed in Texas agree that risk communication needs to evolve.”
Some of the items identified so far include finding ways to break through the noise that is in today’s information environment where people are inundated every day with so many different messages on different platforms.
“There’s a lot of work to be done in risk communication. I’m not sure what the answers are yet and I look forward to continuing to talk to emergency managers and other risk communicators on this project because it’s a huge challenge. There’s not going to be one silver bullet,” Dr. Ross said. “Instead, we believe there will be support from the data we collect that there needs to be a diversity of messages tailored for different groups of people and for different channels of communication. And some of that will rely on what we’ve known about risk communication for years, which is the message content itself matters. But, I think theirs is more. Because I’m a political scientist, I also study how people’s receptivity to messaging through their trust in science. The surveys I’ve analyzed show that social identities and partisanship is a big part of how people perceive technical information.”
Fueled in part by social media algorithms that tend to politicize messaging, crisis and risk communication practitioners are faced with added challenges when crafting a message.
“It depends on how it’s framed and who’s sending the message. When we study this and identify the mechanisms at play, we can improve how we communicate and work together to reduce disaster risk,” Dr. Ross said. “These are interesting things to study from a distance, but at the end of the day, they do impact people’s lives. I’m always aware of that and want to make sure that my research can be helpful and responsive to the needs of our community.”
