Jennifer Helgeson
Biographic Data
| ID | 5773220 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer Helgeson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer |
| FAMILY NAME | Helgeson |
| SIGNATURE | HELGESON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Institute of Standards and Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3692-7874 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Adaptive resilience of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander businesses in the face of Covid-19 and complex events
During the COVID-19 pandemic and concurrent natural disasters, small businesses were hard hit by decreased consumer demand, supply chain interruptions, and increased costs. To understand the impacts of these complex, large-scale events and organizations’ resilience, we surveyed and interviewed 34 U S.-based small and medium-sized business (SMB) operators. We focused on SMB operators identifying as members of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian an…
Simulating future household adaptation to sea level rise using agent-based modeling and reinforcement learning
This paper presents a novel decision support tool for community planners that simulates household adaptation to the future impacts of sea level rise. Local sea level rise scenarios are combined with tide predictions to determine impacts on building exposure, electric power outages, and increases in travel times. Reinforcement learning is then used to train heterogeneous agents – each representing one household – how to respond to these impacts ba…
Community Resilience Planning
Community resilience planning (CRP) research encompasses diverse disciplinary foci, ranging from ecological and sociopolitical to engineering studies, and employs a range of analytic scales and methodologies. Despite the rise of integrative approaches to studying increasingly complex risks faced by communities—in particular, the growing, and often inequitable, impacts of climate and weather stressors and extremes—CRP remains a fragmented field of…
Using Disaster Surveys to Model Business Interruption
Business interruption after disasters is an important metric for community resilience planning because has both economic and social consequences. Each additional day that a business is nonoperational further compounds lost revenue, wages, and lack of access to goods and services needed for recovery. Therefore, the use of surveys has grown in the literature as a way to capture the diverse information needed for modeling business disaster outcomes.…
Mitigating compound coastal water hazards in Eastern North Carolina
Eastern North Carolina (ENC), a predominantly rural region, experiences the intersection of fluvial, pluvial, and tidal flooding, which leads to complex and impactful outcomes. Managing these, often compounding, hazards is challenging, especially as climate change drivers, such as sea-level rise and more intense storms will likely lead to a greater incidence of compound coastal water events (CCWE). Using data from focus group interviews conducted…
Buyout programme experiences and perspectives of local public officials in eastern North Carolina
Eastern North Carolina (ENC) has been buffeted by compound coastal water events (CCWEs) making residential buyouts, that seek to move households and communities out of flood risk areas, an important flood hazard mitigation tool. However, little is known about the experiences of local public officials implementing buyout programmes in rural coastal regions such as ENC in the United States. Using data from focus group interviews conducted with 24 e…
Methods and lessons for business resilience and recovery surveys
A Framework for Characterizing Uncertainty Factors in Postdisaster Structural Performance Assessment Data
Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal
Perspectives of local public officials on the health hazards of compound flooding in Eastern North Carolina
The recurrence of compound flooding in Eastern North Carolina (ENC) leads to place-based short- and long-term health effects in a predominantly rural coastal region. Findings from focus groups with planners, emergency managers, and public officials in 2020 (41 participants) and 2022 (24 participants), show that ENC communities experience place-based health effects that fall under three areas including healthcare access for special needs and aging…
Business recovery from disasters
This paper compares economic recovery in the COVID-19 pandemic with other types of disasters, at the scale of businesses. As countries around the world struggle to emerge from the pandemic, studies of business impact and recovery have proliferated; however, pandemic research is often undertaken without the benefit of insights from long-standing research on past large-scale disruptive events, such as floods, storms, and earthquakes. This paper bui…
The choice of message and messenger to drive behavior change that averts the health impacts of wildfires
Date registered: August 19, 2021; Registration DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JMWUF
Narratives of sustainability in digital media
Making the profound societal transitions and transformations called for in the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 (UN, 2019) and beyond is a critical and urgent challenge for humanity. We propose the collection and analysis of digital narratives (DNs) to observe and assess significant concerns about sustainability and resilience (e.g., as reflected by social movements and interests). Observing temporal changes, globally, in the frequency, …
The effect of natural/human-made hazards on business establishments and their supply chains
This paper examines the impact of natural and human-made hazards on payroll, GDP, employment, and establishment survival/creation in the year of hazard occurrence in the U.S. economy and more specifically in the U.S. manufacturing/goods producing industry. Many of the papers that examine economic impacts of hazards consider upstream impacts of supply chain disruption. Measures of downstream impacts are often limited, particularly in measuring the…
Importance of Households in Business Disaster Recovery
The authors seek to contribute to the understanding of post-disaster community interdependencies by examining the recovery linkages between businesses and households. Specifically, this research looks to identify the household dimensions that affect recovery quality in businesses in Lumberton, North Carolina, after the 2016 Hurricane Matthew. Through an interdisciplinary field study 15 months after the hurricane, businesses were asked about the l…
Community Resilience-Focused Technical Investigation of the 2016 Lumberton, North Carolina, Flood
In early October 2016, Hurricane Matthew crossed North Carolina as a Category 1 storm, with some areas receiving 0.38–0.46 m (15–18 in.) of rainfall on already saturated soil. The NIST-funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning teamed with researchers from NIST’s Engineering Laboratory (Disaster and Failure Studies Program, Community Resilience Group, and the Applied Economics Office) to conduct a field study focused on the impact…
Improving the practice of economic analysis of climate change adaptation
The development of national and sectoral climate change adaptation strategies is burgeoning in the US and elsewhere in response to damages from extreme events and projected future risks from climate change. Increasingly, decision makers are requesting information on the economic damages of climate change as well as costs, benefits, and tradeoffs of alternative actions to inform climate adaptation decisions. This paper provides a practical view of…
Vulnerability to Weather Disasters
Helgeson, J. F., S. Dietz, and S. Hochrainer-Stigler. 2013. Vulnerability to weather disasters: the choice of coping strategies in rural Uganda. Ecology and Society 18(2): 2. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05390-180202
Narratives of sustainability in digital media
Making the profound societal transitions and transformations called for in the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 (UN, 2019) and beyond is a critical and urgent challenge for humanity. We propose the collection and analysis of digital narratives (DNs) to observe and assess significant concerns about sustainability and resilience (e.g., as reflected by social movements and interests). Observing temporal changes, globally, in the frequency, …
Vulnerability to Weather Disasters
Helgeson, J. F., S. Dietz, and S. Hochrainer-Stigler. 2013. Vulnerability to weather disasters: the choice of coping strategies in rural Uganda. Ecology and Society 18(2): 2. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05390-180202
Improving the practice of economic analysis of climate change adaptation
The development of national and sectoral climate change adaptation strategies is burgeoning in the US and elsewhere in response to damages from extreme events and projected future risks from climate change. Increasingly, decision makers are requesting information on the economic damages of climate change as well as costs, benefits, and tradeoffs of alternative actions to inform climate adaptation decisions. This paper provides a practical view of…
Vulnerability to Weather Disasters
Helgeson, J. F., S. Dietz, and S. Hochrainer-Stigler. 2013. Vulnerability to weather disasters: the choice of coping strategies in rural Uganda. Ecology and Society 18(2): 2. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05390-180202
Improving the practice of economic analysis of climate change adaptation
The development of national and sectoral climate change adaptation strategies is burgeoning in the US and elsewhere in response to damages from extreme events and projected future risks from climate change. Increasingly, decision makers are requesting information on the economic damages of climate change as well as costs, benefits, and tradeoffs of alternative actions to inform climate adaptation decisions. This paper provides a practical view of…
Importance of Households in Business Disaster Recovery
The authors seek to contribute to the understanding of post-disaster community interdependencies by examining the recovery linkages between businesses and households. Specifically, this research looks to identify the household dimensions that affect recovery quality in businesses in Lumberton, North Carolina, after the 2016 Hurricane Matthew. Through an interdisciplinary field study 15 months after the hurricane, businesses were asked about the l…
Community Resilience-Focused Technical Investigation of the 2016 Lumberton, North Carolina, Flood
In early October 2016, Hurricane Matthew crossed North Carolina as a Category 1 storm, with some areas receiving 0.38–0.46 m (15–18 in.) of rainfall on already saturated soil. The NIST-funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning teamed with researchers from NIST’s Engineering Laboratory (Disaster and Failure Studies Program, Community Resilience Group, and the Applied Economics Office) to conduct a field study focused on the impact…
The effect of natural/human-made hazards on business establishments and their supply chains
This paper examines the impact of natural and human-made hazards on payroll, GDP, employment, and establishment survival/creation in the year of hazard occurrence in the U.S. economy and more specifically in the U.S. manufacturing/goods producing industry. Many of the papers that examine economic impacts of hazards consider upstream impacts of supply chain disruption. Measures of downstream impacts are often limited, particularly in measuring the…
Business recovery from disasters
This paper compares economic recovery in the COVID-19 pandemic with other types of disasters, at the scale of businesses. As countries around the world struggle to emerge from the pandemic, studies of business impact and recovery have proliferated; however, pandemic research is often undertaken without the benefit of insights from long-standing research on past large-scale disruptive events, such as floods, storms, and earthquakes. This paper bui…
The choice of message and messenger to drive behavior change that averts the health impacts of wildfires
Date registered: August 19, 2021; Registration DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JMWUF
Narratives of sustainability in digital media
Making the profound societal transitions and transformations called for in the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 (UN, 2019) and beyond is a critical and urgent challenge for humanity. We propose the collection and analysis of digital narratives (DNs) to observe and assess significant concerns about sustainability and resilience (e.g., as reflected by social movements and interests). Observing temporal changes, globally, in the frequency, …
Methods and lessons for business resilience and recovery surveys
A Framework for Characterizing Uncertainty Factors in Postdisaster Structural Performance Assessment Data
Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal
Perspectives of local public officials on the health hazards of compound flooding in Eastern North Carolina
The recurrence of compound flooding in Eastern North Carolina (ENC) leads to place-based short- and long-term health effects in a predominantly rural coastal region. Findings from focus groups with planners, emergency managers, and public officials in 2020 (41 participants) and 2022 (24 participants), show that ENC communities experience place-based health effects that fall under three areas including healthcare access for special needs and aging…
Using Disaster Surveys to Model Business Interruption
Business interruption after disasters is an important metric for community resilience planning because has both economic and social consequences. Each additional day that a business is nonoperational further compounds lost revenue, wages, and lack of access to goods and services needed for recovery. Therefore, the use of surveys has grown in the literature as a way to capture the diverse information needed for modeling business disaster outcomes.…
Mitigating compound coastal water hazards in Eastern North Carolina
Eastern North Carolina (ENC), a predominantly rural region, experiences the intersection of fluvial, pluvial, and tidal flooding, which leads to complex and impactful outcomes. Managing these, often compounding, hazards is challenging, especially as climate change drivers, such as sea-level rise and more intense storms will likely lead to a greater incidence of compound coastal water events (CCWE). Using data from focus group interviews conducted…
Buyout programme experiences and perspectives of local public officials in eastern North Carolina
Eastern North Carolina (ENC) has been buffeted by compound coastal water events (CCWEs) making residential buyouts, that seek to move households and communities out of flood risk areas, an important flood hazard mitigation tool. However, little is known about the experiences of local public officials implementing buyout programmes in rural coastal regions such as ENC in the United States. Using data from focus group interviews conducted with 24 e…
Adaptive resilience of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander businesses in the face of Covid-19 and complex events
During the COVID-19 pandemic and concurrent natural disasters, small businesses were hard hit by decreased consumer demand, supply chain interruptions, and increased costs. To understand the impacts of these complex, large-scale events and organizations’ resilience, we surveyed and interviewed 34 U S.-based small and medium-sized business (SMB) operators. We focused on SMB operators identifying as members of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian an…
Simulating future household adaptation to sea level rise using agent-based modeling and reinforcement learning
This paper presents a novel decision support tool for community planners that simulates household adaptation to the future impacts of sea level rise. Local sea level rise scenarios are combined with tide predictions to determine impacts on building exposure, electric power outages, and increases in travel times. Reinforcement learning is then used to train heterogeneous agents – each representing one household – how to respond to these impacts ba…
Community Resilience Planning
Community resilience planning (CRP) research encompasses diverse disciplinary foci, ranging from ecological and sociopolitical to engineering studies, and employs a range of analytic scales and methodologies. Despite the rise of integrative approaches to studying increasingly complex risks faced by communities—in particular, the growing, and often inequitable, impacts of climate and weather stressors and extremes—CRP remains a fragmented field of…
Geography (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Disaster Management and Resilience (7 works) · Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Engineering (5 works) · Environmental planning (5 works)