REGINA — A University of Regina professor has received a $2.4-million Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant for a multiyear project aimed at preparing for natural disasters in more equitable and inclusive ways.
Dr. Amber Fletcher, a researcher and sociology professor at the University of Regina, will lead the five-year project, called Connecting to Place through Disaster Response. According to the university’s news release, it will “explore how post-secondary institutions can effectively work with local communities before, during, and after climate disasters, like floods and wildfires.”
Fletcher discussed what the project hopes to accomplish while speaking with SaskToday.
“The whole project was designed by myself at the University of Regina and also a non-profit organization called Community Campus Engage Canada, which is a national non-profit,” Fletcher said.
“Community Campus Engage Canada is dedicated to supporting research partnerships between university researchers and community grassroots organizations, non-profits, et cetera, in the community. So we know from previous projects that we've done that unfortunately disasters like wildfire and flooding are increasing across the country and that they will increase into the future. And oftentimes communities are not affected equally by these disasters. So differences in things like income or the amount of financial resources people have, age, gender, all these factors make a difference in how people are affected and how they respond to disasters.”
What they wanted to do, she said, was “build a project that could leverage the research resources, the skills that universities have, to think about how those universities can more creatively support communities in responding to and preparing for disaster and hopefully in ways that are more inclusive of the needs of everybody within the community.”
There are two levels of engagement within the project, she said. The first is to “build a knowledge-sharing network between government representatives, academics, non-profit organizations, communities with lived experience.
“And we want to develop a knowledge-sharing and knowledge-exchange network across the country that can really bring together people with three different types of expertise.”
Those three include experts in disaster response and preparation; community-campus engagement professionals who can bring together researchers and students with members of the community to conduct research; and experts in equity and diversity.
“If we can bring together those three groups of people, we can help to answer the questions that each group might have,” Fletcher said.
“So, for example, equity experts, they know the equity issues that are happening, the inequalities that people are dealing with in the community. But they may not be able to connect how, for example, people with intellectual disabilities or older adults or people with chronic health conditions are affected differently by things like heat waves or air quality warnings, for example.
“To do that, they can connect with the disaster experts. And then, as another example, the disaster experts can connect with the community-campus engagement professionals to develop research projects that can better inform disaster response going forward to make sure that it's more inclusive of communities. So we hope to build bridges to create a network to share information between those three different expert groups.”
The second level of engagement will be for teams of researchers and community partners to conduct six community-based case studies across Canada.
Fletcher said each of these different case studies across the country is going to explore one particular situation of disaster response for a specific community.
“Here in Saskatchewan, for example, I'll be leading a case study that looks at how universities can contribute to more trauma-informed evacuation planning for women's shelters. Because we know that sometimes when women's shelters are evacuated, women might be placed in the same evacuation centre as the person who abused them. And so it's really important that we do the planning that can prevent those kinds of things from happening.”
Another example is a team of researchers out of Acadia University, she said, who will be looking at the impacts of extreme weather on people experiencing homelessness and how university research can better support those individuals and reduce the impacts of things like heat waves or air quality warnings.
Fletcher said that from a University of Regina perspective, students there will be taking a major role in the project.
“We have a plan for potentially dozens of students to be involved,” Fletcher said, including people doing their master’s degrees or PhDs, as well as undergrads.
She said students will be “collecting data, working with communities, writing reports and thesis projects. But we also plan to have things like virtual reality simulations, where communities, academic administrators and government leaders, we hope, can come together to use virtual reality to map out if a type of disaster did happen.”
The long-term hope is that this project will contribute to disaster planning efforts in the country.
“Yeah, definitely we hope, because disaster planning and response is such a key focus of this project, we really hope to be producing things like policy briefs, short reports, videos. We've got, for example, a partnership with Prairie Climate Centre, which specializes in documentary film. So we really want to be able to convey the lessons learned from this project with those who are doing disaster planning.”
What they are hoping, Fletcher said, is that “we can contribute in a meaningful way to disaster planning and response strategies like evacuation, that we hope can be really fuelled by what communities feel, what communities want, and what the diverse needs of people within those communities are. So our hope is really to inform policy and practice as much as possible, and creatively with creative outputs too.”
