The increasing severity of weather-related natural disasters is taxing the limits of ecosystem resilience in areas subject to intensive anthropogenic changes. Urban sprawl in combination with global climate change are contributing to catastrophic flooding events as recently witnessed in the United States with hurricanes Harvey and Irma. These two catastrophic flooding events produced long-term damage to residential areas as well as persistent disturbances to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in the impacted regions. Failure to recognize the probability that more catastrophic events such as these will occur can lead to the permanent loss of ecosystems with high ecosystem services value. The Gulf of Mexico has recently been identified as a high-risk ecosystem loss area with great potential to demonstrate natural risk reduction solutions. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have caused unprecedented changes to forested areas, prairies, wetlands, and coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico region. Limited financial and manpower resources are restricting governmental efforts to deal with the ecological impacts of weather-related natural disasters. Governments are compelled to restore the urban infrastructure before taking part in ecological rebuilding. This situation can be remedied by building sustainable partnerships between governmental entities, non-governmental organizations, and individual citizen stakeholders.
Results/Conclusions
Typically, many governmental entities educate stakeholders about local environmental issues and encourage stakeholder representation in the environmental policy process. However, few citizen stakeholders are aware of these efforts to engage them. Even if people know about these efforts, various factors preclude them from participating in the process. Yet, a variety of global projects are indicating that citizen involvement in environmental issues can promote sustainable ecosystem resilience and rebuilding plans. Citizen involvement is most successful when ecologists and other environmental scientists involve individual stakeholders in citizen science and citizen governance engagement activities in collaboration with governmental and non-governmental entities. This is particularly important for the resilience and remediation associated with catastrophic events. The results of these scientist-initiated collaborations have shown promise in a diversity of case studies. Highlighted efforts include projects related to the Flint, Michigan crisis, hurricane Harvey flooding, the Hazaribagh, Bangladesh tanneries pollution calamity, and Manila, Philippines homeless population situation.