Heather Lazrus
Biographic Data
| ID | 596050 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Heather Lazrus |
| GIVEN NAMES | Heather |
| FAMILY NAME | Lazrus |
| SIGNATURE | LAZRUS H |
| AFFILIATIONS | NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1970-6228 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 294 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Examining the roles of visualizations in people's understanding of uncertain storm surge forecasts, interpretation of risk, and decision-making
Integrating Place and Sense of Place into Geovisualizations of Hurricane Storm Surge Risk
Geovisualizations play a central role in communicating hurricane storm surge risks to the public by connecting information about the hazard to a place. Meanwhile, people connect to places through meaning, functions, and emotional bond, known as a sense of place. The mixed-method approach presented in this paper focuses on the intersection of sense of place, geovisualization, and risk communication. We explored place meaning, scale of place, and p…
Improving Tropical Cyclone Forecast Communication by Understanding NWS Partners’ Decision Timelines and Forecast Information Needs
As tropical cyclone threats evolve, broadcast meteorologists and emergency managers rely on timely forecast information to help them communicate risk with the public and protect public safety. This study aims to improve the usability and applicability of National Weather Service (NWS) forecast information in the context of these NWS core partners’ decisions during tropical cyclone threats. The research collected and analyzed data from in-depth in…
Toward usable predictive climate information at decadal timescales
Addressing the challenges of climate-driven community-led resettlement and site expansion: Knowledge sharing, storytelling, healing, and collaborative coalition building
Presently coastal areas globally are becoming unviable, with people no longer able to maintain livelihoods and settlements due to, for example, increasing floods, storm surges, coastal erosion, and sea level rise, yet there exist significant policy obstacles and practical and regulatory challenges to community-led and community-wide responses. For many receiving support only at the individual level for relocation or other adaptive responses, indi…
The influence of cultural worldviews on people’s responses to hurricane risks and threat information
This article explores whether and how cultural worldviews influence people’s responses to approaching natural hazard threats, using data from a survey that asked residents of coastal Florida, USA, about a scenario of a hurricane forecasted to affect their region. The analysis finds that stronger individualist worldview is associated with lower hurricane-related evacuation intentions, cognitive risk perception, negative affect, response and self-e…
Islands on an Angry Earth
This chapter summarizes the links between climate change and disasters, and then charts the ways in which the theoretical underpinnings of anthropology of disaster extends to our interrogation of disasters precipitated by the planet’s changing climate. It reviews anthropological framing of risk and vulnerability that are particularly revealing of the ways in which islands are enmeshed in broader processes of planetary change, belying notions that…
Explaining differential vulnerability to climate change: A social science review
The varied effects of recent extreme weather events around the world exemplify the uneven impacts of climate change on populations, even within relatively small geographic regions. Differential human vulnerability to environmental hazards results from a range of social, economic, historical, and political factors, all of which operate at multiple scales. While adaptation to climate change has been the dominant focus of policy and research agendas…
A Story of “Rising Voices” and Intercultural Collaboration
Until recently, the voices and wisdom of Indigenous peoples have been largely excluded from climate change science, decision making, and governance. Encouragingly, a shift has emerged in the last few decades. Today, a number of scientists realize the critical importance and value of Indigenous peoples' wisdom, observations, insights, and knowledge. This shift in awareness is visible in initiatives from climate assessments to university- and agenc…
“Sometimes da #beachlife ain't always da wave”: Understanding People’s Evolving Hurricane Risk Communication, Risk Assessments, and Responses Using Twitter Narratives
This article investigates the dynamic ways that people communicate, assess, and respond as a weather threat evolves. It uses social media data, which offer unique records of what people convey about their real-world risk contexts. Twitter narratives from 53 people who were in a mandatory evacuation zone in a New York City neighborhood during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were qualitatively analyzed. The study provides rich insight into the complex, dyn…
A Mental Models Study of Hurricane Forecast and Warning Production, Communication, and Decision-Making
The study reported here explores how to enhance the public value of hurricane forecast and warning information by examining the entire warning process. A mental models research approach is applied to address three risk management tasks critical to warnings for extreme weather events: 1) understanding the risk decision and action context for hurricane warnings, 2) understanding the commonalities and conflicts in interpretations of that context and…
“Drought is a Relative Term: ” Drought Risk Perceptions and Water Management Preferences among Diverse Community Members in Oklahoma, USA
Climate migrants and new identities? The geopolitics of embracing or rejecting mobility
New evidence is emerging to suggest that climate change mobility is giving effect to changing forms of island identity among Tuvaluans and i-Kiribati. This nascent shift prompts a number of questions addressed in this paper. What, for example, does climate change migration mean for island identity and its geographic performance? How does the spatialization of identity inform shared experiences of climate change, and how does identity assist in th…
Factors Affecting Hurricane Evacuation Intentions
Protective actions for hurricane threats are a function of the environmental and information context; individual and household characteristics, including cultural worldviews, past hurricane experiences, and risk perceptions; and motivations and barriers to actions. Using survey data from the Miami‐Dade and Houston‐Galveston areas, we regress individuals’ stated evacuation intentions on these factors in two information conditions: (1) seeing a for…
Risk Perception and Climate Adaptation in Tuvalu: A Combined Cultural Theory and Traditional Knowledge Approach
At the local level, where the most adaptation to climate impacts takes place, adaptation decision making and planning are closely tied to how people perceive climate risks. In Tuvalu, a low-lying Pacific island nation, ways of perceiving climate risks encompass both understandings about potential hazards wrought by a changing climate as well as culturally informed understandings about appropriate responses to the threats born from those hazards. …
Migration or Forced Displacement: The Complex Choices of Climate Change and Disaster Migrants in Shishmaref, Alaska and Nanumea, Tuvalu
This article compares migration options in Shishmaref, Alaska and Nanumea, Tuvalu as responses to increasing risk of disaster. In both communities, increasing hazards and risks are associated with climate change—making the communities some of the first to be identified as environmental migrants or “climate refugees.” In both cases, what residents, researchers, and other stakeholders fear is that a large disaster will take lives and destroy critic…
The Cultural Theory of Risk for Climate Change Adaptation
The way in which people perceive climate change risk is informed by their social interactions and cultural worldviews comprising fundamental beliefs about society and nature. Therefore, perceptions of climate change risk and vulnerability along with people’s “myths of nature”—that is, how groups of people conceptualize the way nature functions—influence the feasibility and acceptability of climate adaptation planning, policy making, and implement…
Recognitions and Responsibilities: On the Origins and Consequences of the Uneven Attention to Climate Change around the World
Though climate change is a global process, current discussions emphasize its local impacts. A review of media representations, public opinion polls, international organization documents, and scientific reports shows that global attention to climate change is distributed unevenly, with the impacts of climate change seen as an urgent concern in some places and less pressing in others. This uneven attention, or specificity, is linked to issues of se…
The impact of climate change on tribal communities in the US: Displacement, relocation, and human rights
Vulnerability beyond Stereotypes: Context and Agency in Hurricane Risk Communication
Risk communication may accentuate or alleviate the vulnerability of people who have particular difficulties responding to the threat of hazards such as hurricanes. The process of risk communication involves how hazard information is received, understood, and responded to by individuals and groups. Thus, risk communication and vulnerability interact through peoples' knowledge, attitudes, and practices. This study explores risk communication with s…
Sea Change: Island Communities and Climate Change
Island communities stand to be among the first and most adversely affected by the impacts of global climate change. Rising sea levels, changing precipitation and storm patterns, and increasing air and sea-surface temperatures stress already limited island resources while climate change policies circumscribe local decision making. Anthropologists make important contributions to understanding island-based knowledge, global causes of vulnerability, …
The first climate refugees? Contesting global narratives of climate change in Tuvalu
Water Scarcity and Climate Change in Tuvalu
Use of traditional knowledge in emergency management for tsunami hazard: A case study from Washington State, USA
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore a case study in Washington State, USA where traditional stories (“oral tradition”) are being used in a contemporary context. Traditional knowledge is a system of experiential knowledge acquired through the continual observation of and interaction with the environment. This form of knowledge is still held by many societies and can provide an important contribution in emergency management for natural …
The Noaa Fisheries Alaska Native Traditional Environmental Knowledge Database
Anthropologists working in natural resource management agencies have particularly important and interesting roles to play in raising awareness of long-standing relationships between local communities and natural resources, and in promoting means of reflecting this relationship while avoiding potentially harmful outcomes of careless incorporation of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) in resource management. While there are many different ap…
The first climate refugees? Contesting global narratives of climate change in Tuvalu
Sea Change: Island Communities and Climate Change
Island communities stand to be among the first and most adversely affected by the impacts of global climate change. Rising sea levels, changing precipitation and storm patterns, and increasing air and sea-surface temperatures stress already limited island resources while climate change policies circumscribe local decision making. Anthropologists make important contributions to understanding island-based knowledge, global causes of vulnerability, …
Climate migrants and new identities? The geopolitics of embracing or rejecting mobility
New evidence is emerging to suggest that climate change mobility is giving effect to changing forms of island identity among Tuvaluans and i-Kiribati. This nascent shift prompts a number of questions addressed in this paper. What, for example, does climate change migration mean for island identity and its geographic performance? How does the spatialization of identity inform shared experiences of climate change, and how does identity assist in th…
Recognitions and Responsibilities: On the Origins and Consequences of the Uneven Attention to Climate Change around the World
Though climate change is a global process, current discussions emphasize its local impacts. A review of media representations, public opinion polls, international organization documents, and scientific reports shows that global attention to climate change is distributed unevenly, with the impacts of climate change seen as an urgent concern in some places and less pressing in others. This uneven attention, or specificity, is linked to issues of se…
The influence of cultural worldviews on people’s responses to hurricane risks and threat information
This article explores whether and how cultural worldviews influence people’s responses to approaching natural hazard threats, using data from a survey that asked residents of coastal Florida, USA, about a scenario of a hurricane forecasted to affect their region. The analysis finds that stronger individualist worldview is associated with lower hurricane-related evacuation intentions, cognitive risk perception, negative affect, response and self-e…
Addressing the challenges of climate-driven community-led resettlement and site expansion: Knowledge sharing, storytelling, healing, and collaborative coalition building
Presently coastal areas globally are becoming unviable, with people no longer able to maintain livelihoods and settlements due to, for example, increasing floods, storm surges, coastal erosion, and sea level rise, yet there exist significant policy obstacles and practical and regulatory challenges to community-led and community-wide responses. For many receiving support only at the individual level for relocation or other adaptive responses, indi…
The Noaa Fisheries Alaska Native Traditional Environmental Knowledge Database
Anthropologists working in natural resource management agencies have particularly important and interesting roles to play in raising awareness of long-standing relationships between local communities and natural resources, and in promoting means of reflecting this relationship while avoiding potentially harmful outcomes of careless incorporation of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) in resource management. While there are many different ap…
Use of traditional knowledge in emergency management for tsunami hazard: A case study from Washington State, USA
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore a case study in Washington State, USA where traditional stories (“oral tradition”) are being used in a contemporary context. Traditional knowledge is a system of experiential knowledge acquired through the continual observation of and interaction with the environment. This form of knowledge is still held by many societies and can provide an important contribution in emergency management for natural …
Water Scarcity and Climate Change in Tuvalu
The first climate refugees? Contesting global narratives of climate change in Tuvalu
Vulnerability beyond Stereotypes: Context and Agency in Hurricane Risk Communication
Risk communication may accentuate or alleviate the vulnerability of people who have particular difficulties responding to the threat of hazards such as hurricanes. The process of risk communication involves how hazard information is received, understood, and responded to by individuals and groups. Thus, risk communication and vulnerability interact through peoples' knowledge, attitudes, and practices. This study explores risk communication with s…
Sea Change: Island Communities and Climate Change
Island communities stand to be among the first and most adversely affected by the impacts of global climate change. Rising sea levels, changing precipitation and storm patterns, and increasing air and sea-surface temperatures stress already limited island resources while climate change policies circumscribe local decision making. Anthropologists make important contributions to understanding island-based knowledge, global causes of vulnerability, …
The impact of climate change on tribal communities in the US: Displacement, relocation, and human rights
The Cultural Theory of Risk for Climate Change Adaptation
The way in which people perceive climate change risk is informed by their social interactions and cultural worldviews comprising fundamental beliefs about society and nature. Therefore, perceptions of climate change risk and vulnerability along with people’s “myths of nature”—that is, how groups of people conceptualize the way nature functions—influence the feasibility and acceptability of climate adaptation planning, policy making, and implement…
Recognitions and Responsibilities: On the Origins and Consequences of the Uneven Attention to Climate Change around the World
Though climate change is a global process, current discussions emphasize its local impacts. A review of media representations, public opinion polls, international organization documents, and scientific reports shows that global attention to climate change is distributed unevenly, with the impacts of climate change seen as an urgent concern in some places and less pressing in others. This uneven attention, or specificity, is linked to issues of se…
Factors Affecting Hurricane Evacuation Intentions
Protective actions for hurricane threats are a function of the environmental and information context; individual and household characteristics, including cultural worldviews, past hurricane experiences, and risk perceptions; and motivations and barriers to actions. Using survey data from the Miami‐Dade and Houston‐Galveston areas, we regress individuals’ stated evacuation intentions on these factors in two information conditions: (1) seeing a for…
Risk Perception and Climate Adaptation in Tuvalu: A Combined Cultural Theory and Traditional Knowledge Approach
At the local level, where the most adaptation to climate impacts takes place, adaptation decision making and planning are closely tied to how people perceive climate risks. In Tuvalu, a low-lying Pacific island nation, ways of perceiving climate risks encompass both understandings about potential hazards wrought by a changing climate as well as culturally informed understandings about appropriate responses to the threats born from those hazards. …
Migration or Forced Displacement: The Complex Choices of Climate Change and Disaster Migrants in Shishmaref, Alaska and Nanumea, Tuvalu
This article compares migration options in Shishmaref, Alaska and Nanumea, Tuvalu as responses to increasing risk of disaster. In both communities, increasing hazards and risks are associated with climate change—making the communities some of the first to be identified as environmental migrants or “climate refugees.” In both cases, what residents, researchers, and other stakeholders fear is that a large disaster will take lives and destroy critic…
A Mental Models Study of Hurricane Forecast and Warning Production, Communication, and Decision-Making
The study reported here explores how to enhance the public value of hurricane forecast and warning information by examining the entire warning process. A mental models research approach is applied to address three risk management tasks critical to warnings for extreme weather events: 1) understanding the risk decision and action context for hurricane warnings, 2) understanding the commonalities and conflicts in interpretations of that context and…
“Drought is a Relative Term: ” Drought Risk Perceptions and Water Management Preferences among Diverse Community Members in Oklahoma, USA
Climate migrants and new identities? The geopolitics of embracing or rejecting mobility
New evidence is emerging to suggest that climate change mobility is giving effect to changing forms of island identity among Tuvaluans and i-Kiribati. This nascent shift prompts a number of questions addressed in this paper. What, for example, does climate change migration mean for island identity and its geographic performance? How does the spatialization of identity inform shared experiences of climate change, and how does identity assist in th…
“Sometimes da #beachlife ain't always da wave”: Understanding People’s Evolving Hurricane Risk Communication, Risk Assessments, and Responses Using Twitter Narratives
This article investigates the dynamic ways that people communicate, assess, and respond as a weather threat evolves. It uses social media data, which offer unique records of what people convey about their real-world risk contexts. Twitter narratives from 53 people who were in a mandatory evacuation zone in a New York City neighborhood during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were qualitatively analyzed. The study provides rich insight into the complex, dyn…
Islands on an Angry Earth
This chapter summarizes the links between climate change and disasters, and then charts the ways in which the theoretical underpinnings of anthropology of disaster extends to our interrogation of disasters precipitated by the planet’s changing climate. It reviews anthropological framing of risk and vulnerability that are particularly revealing of the ways in which islands are enmeshed in broader processes of planetary change, belying notions that…
Explaining differential vulnerability to climate change: A social science review
The varied effects of recent extreme weather events around the world exemplify the uneven impacts of climate change on populations, even within relatively small geographic regions. Differential human vulnerability to environmental hazards results from a range of social, economic, historical, and political factors, all of which operate at multiple scales. While adaptation to climate change has been the dominant focus of policy and research agendas…
A Story of “Rising Voices” and Intercultural Collaboration
Until recently, the voices and wisdom of Indigenous peoples have been largely excluded from climate change science, decision making, and governance. Encouragingly, a shift has emerged in the last few decades. Today, a number of scientists realize the critical importance and value of Indigenous peoples' wisdom, observations, insights, and knowledge. This shift in awareness is visible in initiatives from climate assessments to university- and agenc…
The influence of cultural worldviews on people’s responses to hurricane risks and threat information
This article explores whether and how cultural worldviews influence people’s responses to approaching natural hazard threats, using data from a survey that asked residents of coastal Florida, USA, about a scenario of a hurricane forecasted to affect their region. The analysis finds that stronger individualist worldview is associated with lower hurricane-related evacuation intentions, cognitive risk perception, negative affect, response and self-e…
Toward usable predictive climate information at decadal timescales
Addressing the challenges of climate-driven community-led resettlement and site expansion: Knowledge sharing, storytelling, healing, and collaborative coalition building
Presently coastal areas globally are becoming unviable, with people no longer able to maintain livelihoods and settlements due to, for example, increasing floods, storm surges, coastal erosion, and sea level rise, yet there exist significant policy obstacles and practical and regulatory challenges to community-led and community-wide responses. For many receiving support only at the individual level for relocation or other adaptive responses, indi…
Improving Tropical Cyclone Forecast Communication by Understanding NWS Partners’ Decision Timelines and Forecast Information Needs
As tropical cyclone threats evolve, broadcast meteorologists and emergency managers rely on timely forecast information to help them communicate risk with the public and protect public safety. This study aims to improve the usability and applicability of National Weather Service (NWS) forecast information in the context of these NWS core partners’ decisions during tropical cyclone threats. The research collected and analyzed data from in-depth in…
Integrating Place and Sense of Place into Geovisualizations of Hurricane Storm Surge Risk
Geovisualizations play a central role in communicating hurricane storm surge risks to the public by connecting information about the hazard to a place. Meanwhile, people connect to places through meaning, functions, and emotional bond, known as a sense of place. The mixed-method approach presented in this paper focuses on the intersection of sense of place, geovisualization, and risk communication. We explored place meaning, scale of place, and p…
Examining the roles of visualizations in people's understanding of uncertain storm surge forecasts, interpretation of risk, and decision-making
Geography (20 works) · Disaster Management and Resilience (18 works) · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Climate change (10 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Environmental resource management (9 works) · Environmental ethics (8 works)