Twenty-Five Years After September 11th, 2001, New York City Changed the Way We Prepare for Disasters

Twenty-five years after September 11th, 2001, it is still difficult to contemplate what happened without first thinking about the people. The firefighters and police officers who ran toward the World Trade Center, the emergency managers and health professionals trying to make sense of an unconceivable situation, the transit workers helping people evacuate Lower Manhattan, and …

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Capacity Building with the Ethiopian Meteorological Institute

By Sumana Palle Introduction In December 2025, I traveled to Addis Ababa, as part of a technical capacity-building mission with NCDP’s Financial Instruments (FIST) team, formerly of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI). Led by Max Mauerman from NCDP and Jeff Turmelle from the Columbia Climate School, the mission was conducted in …

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Leveraging Next-Generation Tsunami Early Warning Systems to Save Lives

Also published in the Columbia Climate School, State of the Planet. When an enormous 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, the impact reached far beyond its epicenter. In the passing hours, tsunami alerts were issued by several nations with coastlines along the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire, prompting evacuations and escalating emergency response efforts from …

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What is the Climate Finance Vulnerability Index (CliF-VI)?

By: Amy Campbell, Student Researcher, National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) Adaptation finance is critically underfunded, with existing finance skewed toward mitigation and middle-income markets. Many countries facing the highest climate risk also carry significant debt burdens and have been repeatedly downgraded by credit rating agencies, thereby increasing their cost of capital and pushing adaptation …

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AI for Wildfires and Heatwaves

Image credit: Bellwether LEAP Wallerstein Panel Series: AI + Extreme Weather Preparedness Based on panel presentations and discussions by Ali Ahmadalipour, Elena Xoplaki, Jatan Buch, and Jorge Pérez Aracil. The 2025 wildfire season in the United States is forecasted to be above normal, highlighting the need to leverage emerging technologies for hazard risk mitigation. At …

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Data and AI for Decision-Support and Policy

Image: Whitehall Street Station Flooding LEAP Wallerstein Panel Series: AI + Extreme Weather Preparedness Based on panel presentations and discussions by Dr. Terri Adams-Fuller, Dr. Equisha Glenn, and Dr. Miguel-Ángel Fernández-Torres. Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) offer new avenues to provide data and build decision support tools that can facilitate extreme weather preparedness …

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