Event 

Small Business Vulnerability and Resilience in Coastal Communities: An Exploratory Study of New York and New Jersey

Wednesday 20 March, 2024 – Wednesday 20 March, 2024
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Online

Part of the Hazard, Risk and Disaster (HRD) Research Lecture Series 2023-24.

The resilience of small businesses to extreme events is interconnected with the resilience of whole communities, but the dependencies are only beginning to be studied.

This study explores how complex extreme events have impacted small businesses in two diverse, coastal areas within the New York City – New Jersey metropolitan region. The region is exposed to a range of climate hazards, which are overlapping with economic stresses associated with the Covid-19 pandemic including labour shortages and high rates of inflation.

The study contributes to ongoing initiatives to build community resilience in coastal regions through investigation of vulnerabilities and resilience challenges and opportunities that are specific to small coastal businesses, as well as interdependencies between business resilience, residents, and other components of the community system.

About the speaker

Robin Leichenko is Professor of Geography at Rutgers University and co-Director of the Rutgers Climate Institute. Her current research explores the economic and equity impacts of climate change with a focus on the northeastern United States. Leichenko is currently serving as co-PI of the NOAA RISA Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast.

Leichenko has authored or co-authored three books and more than 100 journal articles, book chapters, and scientific reports. Her book, Environmental Change and Globalisation: Double Exposures (2008, Oxford University Press, with Karen O’Brien), won the Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Contribution from the American Association of Geographers. Her latest book, Climate and Society: Transforming the Future (with Karen O’Brien) was published by Polity Press in 2019.

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