• Rising Sea Levels Impact the National Flood Insurance Program

    Insurance policy premiums from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) allow policyholders to maintain a lower, grandfathered rate even when the risk escalates. But as coastal flooding increases due to rising sea level and more intense storms, research suggests this grandfathered policy could lead to big losses for the NFIP.

  • Climate Change Has Caused Billions of Dollars in Flood Damages

    Flooding has caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage in the U.S. over the past three decades. Researchers found that 36 percent of the costs of flooding in the U.S. from 1988 to 2017 were a result of intensifying precipitation, consistent with predictions of global warming.

  • Winter Storm Could Cost Texas More Money Than Any Disaster in State History

    Lawmakers and analysts say it is too soon for an exact estimate, but the financial damage from the storm has left state lawmakers scrambling to account for the storm in the middle of the 2021 legislative session.

  • Biden Orders Review to Bolster Supply Chain Resiliency

    President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday to formally order a 100-day government review of global supply chains and potential U.S. vulnerabilities in key industries including computer chips, electric vehicle batteries, pharmaceuticals and critical minerals used in electronics. On top of the 100-day review of these four key industries, Biden’s order also directs yearlong reviews for six sectors: defense, public health, information technology, transportation, energy and food production.

  • The Disaster that Helped the Nation Prepare for Future Earthquakes: Remembering San Fernando

    The San Fernando earthquake struck Southern California 50 years ago, killing 64 people and costing over $500 million in damages. The quake prompted federal, state and local action to reduce earthquake risks and bolster public safety.

  • Preventing Cybersecurity Disruptions by Training Workforce

    Two cybersecurity researchers have published a new book to help train employees at public utilities to recognize cybersecurity vulnerabilities and develop measures to defend their networks from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.

  • Security Threats which Bind Us

    The Converging Risks Lab of the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) released a report last week which identifies ecological disruption as a major and underappreciated security threat and calls on the United States to reboot its national security architecture and doctrine to better respond to this evolving threat landscape.

  • Helping Industry Develop Secure Grid Technologies

    Rapid development and deployment of new technologies in the energy delivery systems marketplace make the power grid a hotbed for innovation—and an attractive target for cybercriminals. Cybersecurity researchers are working to change that by building next-generation tools for hardening the power grid—and other critical infrastructure—against attack.

  • A Key Step in Preventing a Future SolarWinds

    In the weeks since news of the SolarWinds incident became public, commentators have offered no shortage of prescriptions for responding to the incident. Natalie Thompson writes that as information continues to emerge about the scope and scale of the incident and policymakers struggle with thorny questions regarding appropriate responses, urgent attention also is needed to actions that could prevent such large-scale catastrophes in the future.

  • Tsunamis and Tsunami Warning: Recent Progress and Future Prospects

    Tsunamis are one of the most destructive disasters in the ocean. Large tsunamis are mostly generated by earthquakes, and they can propagate across the ocean without significantly losing energy. During the shoaling process in coastal areas, the wave amplitude increases dramatically, causing severe life loss and property damage. A recent paper reviews the recent research progress on earthquake-generated tsunamis, from the aspects of tsunami generation, propagation, inversion and warning.

  • Role of Dams in Reducing Global Flood Risks under Climate Change

    Flood is amongst the costliest natural disasters. Globally, flood risk is projected to increase in the future, driven by climate change and population growth. The role of dams in flood mitigation, previously unaccounted for, was found to decrease by approximately 15 percent the number of people globally exposed to historical once-in-100-year floods, downstream of dams during the twenty-first century.

  • Aging Dams Pose Growing Threat

    By 2050, most people on Earth will live downstream of tens of thousands of large dams built in the twentieth century, many of them already operating at or beyond their design life. Increasingly expensive to maintain, experts foresee a trend to decommissioning dams.

  • The SolarWinds Hack Can Directly Affect Control Systems

    Much of the initial discussion around the SolarWinds cyberattack focused on its impact on the affected information technology (IT) systems. Joe Weiss and Bob Hunter write that this overlooks an equally destructive yet unexamined operational technology (OT) portion of the attack, and much of the OT impact may not be seen for months or longer. Weiss and Hunter note that researchers have long warned about the dangers posed by OT attacks, and that Russian hackers have become extremely adept at control system cyberattacks.

  • Mitigating Coastal Flooding, Erosion and Storm Damage

    Sea level rise and wave-induced flooding during increasingly frequent storm events threaten sustainability of the more than 1,700 Department of Defense (DoD) managed military installations in coastal areas worldwide. Current DoD coastal protection measures, including bulkhead and coastal seawalls, may reflect wave energy, exacerbate flooding, create downstream sediment loss, and restrict water exchange. DARPA’s Reefense program aims to develop novel hybrid biological and engineered reef-mimicking structures to mitigate wave and storm damage and reduce the ecological impact of current coastal protection measures.

     

  • High Rises Made of Timber

    With an increasing demand for a more sustainable alternative for high-rise construction, new points to timber as a sustainable and effective way to make tall, high-density, and renewable buildings. Tall mass-timber buildings are a safe and sustainable alternative for high-rise construction,