‘Come Back at Us’: Reflections on Researcher-Community Partnerships during a Post-Oil Spill Gulf Coast Resilience Study

A disaster's disparate impacts: analysing perceived stress and personal resilience across gender and race

This research sought to identify differences in perceived stress and personal resilience across gender, race, and different types of stressors (such as rent or mortgage stress) among a sample of United States residents experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic. It used a cross-sectional, convenience sampling design for primary survey data collected over 10 weeks starting in April 2020 (n=374). Independent t-tests and binary logistic regression were performed to determine statistically significant differences between gender and race for perceived stress and personal resilience and to pinpoint key contributing factors. Results indicate women exhibited higher levels of stress, with non-IPV (intimate partner violence) reporting women evidencing higher levels of resilience than IPV reporting women. Racial minority women were more likely to experience nutritional stress, whereas White women were more likely to worry about rent or mortgage stress. These findings provide insight into disparate impacts across vulnerable populations at the start of a crisis with implications for improving pre- and post-disaster interventions.

Cross-Cultural Environmental Research: Lessons from the Field

Environmental research with diverse stakeholders poses challenges for researchers, particularly when that research is also cross-cultural and/or cross-language. We argue that cross-cultural and/or cross-language environmental research requires translators and interpreters as active research partners, culture brokers and community partners to support research accountability and engagement, and that face-to-face surveys address challenges of other survey modes in cross-language and/or cross-cultural research. Drawing upon cross-cultural and cross-language environmental research with Vietnamese-American fishers on the U.S. Gulf Coast, we find that face-to-face surveys may promote response rate and allow for clarification, particularly for participants with language and cultural barriers. Translators, interpreters, culture brokers, and community partners play a critical role in cross-language and cross-cultural research and researchers must reflect on their role shaping research.

Eroding Land and Erasing Place: A Qualitative Study of Place Attachment, Risk Perception, and Coastal Land Loss in Southern Louisiana

Southern Louisiana and its coastal bayous are sites of both frequent flooding and rapid coastal land loss, exacerbated by the increasing effects of climate change. Though much work has examined flood risk perceptions in coastal areas, few studies have considered the qualitative and contextual dimensions of perceptions of coastal land loss and its associated impacts, and how these perceptions relate to local culture, place, and intentions to mitigate personal exposure to risk. We conducted six focus groups in areas with distinct exposure to coastal land loss. Participants expressed strong attachment to community, culture, and place. Personal ties to land loss through family or social connections, experiences with fishing and water-based activities, and indirect impacts on Louisiana’s seafood industry and cuisine provided a lens for understanding the immediate impacts of coastal land loss. Participants felt that exposure to the risks of land loss was inevitable and that mitigation was beyond individual efforts, a feeling that manifested both as pessimism and as a resilient focus on collective action. Considering state history with political corruption, participants generally distrusted state-level mitigation initiatives. These findings shed light on the qualitative dimensions of coastal land loss perceptions in southern Louisiana and their relation to place attachment, mitigation intentions, and sources of risk information. While participants with personal ties to risk report feelings of exposure and inevitability, they are also embedded in communities with strong ties to place. This nuance only complicates the meanings that individuals associate with land loss and the actions that they are motivated to take; impacts of coastal land loss on the landscape and distinct place characteristics of southern Louisiana may lead to significant disruption to identity and well-being, but also provide a pathway for risk awareness and potential motivation of collective mitigation actions.

Framework for a Community Health Observing System for the Gulf of Mexico Region: Preparing for Future Disasters

The Gulf of Mexico (GoM) region is prone to disasters, including recurrent oil spills, hurricanes, floods, industrial accidents, harmful algal blooms, and the current COVID-19 pandemic. The GoM and other regions of the U.S. lack sufficient baseline health information to identify, attribute, mitigate, and facilitate prevention of major health effects of disasters. Developing capacity to assess adverse human health consequences of future disasters requires establishment of a comprehensive, sustained community health observing system, similar to the extensive and well-established environmental observing systems. We propose a system that combines six levels of health data domains, beginning with three existing, national surveys and studies plus three new nested, longitudinal cohort studies. The latter are the unique and most important parts of the system and are focused on the coastal regions of the five GoM States. A statistically representative sample of participants is proposed for the new cohort studies, stratified to ensure proportional inclusion of urban and rural populations and with additional recruitment as necessary to enroll participants from particularly vulnerable or under-represented groups. Secondary data sources such as syndromic surveillance systems, electronic health records, national community surveys, environmental exposure databases, social media, and remote sensing will inform and augment the collection of primary data. Primary data sources will include participant-provided information via questionnaires, clinical measures of mental and physical health, acquisition of biological specimens, and wearable health monitoring devices. A suite of biomarkers may be derived from biological specimens for use in health assessments, including calculation of allostatic load, a measure of cumulative stress. The framework also addresses data management and sharing, participant retention, and system governance. The observing system is designed to continue indefinitely to ensure that essential pre-, during-, and post-disaster health data are collected and maintained. It could also provide a model/vehicle for effective health observation related to infectious disease pandemics such as COVID-19. To our knowledge, there is no comprehensive, disaster-focused health observing system such as the one proposed here currently in existence or planned elsewhere. Significant strengths of the GoM Community Health Observing System (CHOS) are its longitudinal cohorts and ability to adapt rapidly as needs arise and new technologies develop.

Oil Spills and Human Health: Contributions of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative

The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) was established in 2010 with $500 million in funding provided by British Petroleum over a 10-year period to support research on the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and recovery. Contributions of the GoMRI program to date focused on human health are presented in more than 32 peer-reviewed papers published between 2011 and May 2019. Primary findings from review of these papers are (i) the large quantity of dispersants used in the oil cleanup have been associated with human health concerns, including through obesogenicity, toxicity, and illnesses from aerosolization of the agents; (ii) oil contamination has been associated with potential for increases in harmful algal blooms and numbers of pathogenic Vibrio bacteria in oil-impacted waters; and (iii) members of Gulf communities who are heavily reliant upon natural resources for their livelihoods were found to be vulnerable to high levels of life disruptions and institutional distrust. Positive correlations include a finding that a high level of community attachment was beneficial for recovery. Actions taken to improve disaster response and reduce stress-associated health effects could lessen negative impacts of similar disasters in the future. Furthermore, GoMRI has supported annual conferences beginning in 2013 at which informative human health-related presentations have been made. Based on this review, it is recommended that the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 be updated to include enhanced funding for oil spill impacts to human health.