Director, Climate Change Science & Policy Hub | Core Faculty, Disaster Research Center | Associate Professor, Biden School of Public Policy and Administration & Department of Geography & Spatial Sciences University of Delaware
Newark DE
Prof. Siders' research focuses on climate change adaptation policies with an emphasis on relocation and fairness in adaptation.
Fast-striking and unpredictable, tornadoes pose major challenges for emergency planners
At least 20 U.S. states have been hit with tornadoes – some of them deadly – over the past week. Experts from the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center can speak to the difficulty of drawing up plans in advance of tornadoes, which can develop quickly and unexpectedly, as well as a variety of topics related to storm preparedness, evacuations and recovery.
Those experts include: Jennifer Horney: Environmental impacts of disasters and potential public health impacts for chronic and infectious diseases. Horney, who co-authored a paper on the increase in tornado outbreaks, can talk about how impacts on the morbidity and mortality that result from tornadoes.
Tricia Wachtendorf: Evacuation decision-making, disaster response and coordination, disaster relief (donations) and logistics, volunteer and emergent efforts, social vulnerability.
James Kendra: Disaster response, nursing homes and hospitals, volunteers, response coordination.
Jennifer Trivedi: Challenges for people with disabilities during disaster, cultural issues and long-term recovery.
Sarah DeYoung: Pets in emergencies, infant feeding in disasters and decision-making in evacuation.
A.R. Siders: Expert on sea level rise and managed retreat – the concept of planned community movement away from flood-prone areas.
To reach these experts directly, visit their profile and click on the contact button.
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2 min
Hurricane Helene: Addressing health and safety concerns as communities rebuild
With Hurricane Helene bearing down on the Gulf region, millions of people are deciding whether or not to evacuate from their homes or ride the storm out. How to best protect their families, concerns over feeding their infants and what to do with beloved pets will all factor into their decisions. Understanding the reasons why individuals choose one course of action over the other is a complex issue that researchers in the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center have been studying for years.
The following experts in the DRC, the oldest such center in the United States, can comment on the following topics:
Tricia Wachtendorf: Evacuation decision-making, disaster response and coordination, disaster relief (donations) and logistics, volunteer and emergent efforts, social vulnerability.
James Kendra: Disaster response, nursing homes and hospitals, volunteers, response coordination.
A.R. Siders: Expert on sea level rise and managed retreat – the concept of planned community movement away from coastlines and flood-prone areas. Specifically, Siders can talk about how building more homes and infrastructure in flood-prone areas in Florida makes the consequences of hurricanes like Helene more severe. (How the 'expanding bullseye' is contributing to the rising disaster costs in the U.S.). She authored two papers slated for release on floodplain development (noting the more than 400,000 homes that were built in regulated floodplains 2001-2019).
Jennifer Horney: Environmental impacts of disasters and potential public health impacts for chronic and infectious diseases.
Sarah DeYoung: Pets in emergencies, infant feeding in disasters and decision-making in evacuation. Specifically, DeYoung can speak to reports that mothers in Florida social media groups are concerned about storage of breastmilk if/when the power goes out.
Jennifer Trivedi: Can talk about preparedness steps and recovery, including recovery planning, particularly in non-coastal areas; as well as challenges for people with disabilities during disaster, cultural issues and long-term recovery.
Victor Perez: Focuses on environmental racism and health disparities in historically marginalized communities.
Shanjia Dong: Research looks at smart and resilient urban systems; infrastructure systems, critical infrastructure protection, effective disaster preparedness and response, and equitable resilience planning and climate change adaptation.
Joe Trainor: Post-storm housing decisions and insurance.
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2 min
Video games tackle climate change
The University of Delaware recently hosted a Climate Change Video Game Jam for students that paired the ingenuity of designing a video game with activism and the use of research to address one of the world's biggest problems.
The national video game design competition was the brainchild of A.R. Siders, director of the UD's Mangone Climate Change Science and Policy Hub and core faculty in the Disaster Research Center. Participants representing five universities — UD, the University of California Irvine, Ohio University, the University of Southern California and Irvine Valley College — competed in the event at UD's Esports Arena. Eight games were submitted and ran the gamut in their design, gameplay and visual effects. They ranged from a game focused on sustainable fishing, an ocean pollution clean-up, pirates cleaning oil spills, a mermaid helping her sea creature friends and a professor collecting magical stones to address storms and sea level rise.
Four games included original artwork — both hand-drawn pixel art and 3-D models — and original sound effects and music. One had voice acting by the lead developer because the team “wanted to center her voice” in the game both figuratively and literally. The students behind the latter walked away victorious.
As a self-proclaimed “climate geek” and long-time gamer, the idea for such an event was a natural way for Siders to marry two of her passions while actively engaging UD’s student body in addressing environmental issues.
“The Jam is a great opportunity to bring people together from totally different perspectives who are all excited about the connections across these themes,” Siders said. “Facts and charts don’t move people. They don’t inspire action or instigate change, but video games can change how people think about climate change.”
Siders also hopes that the game jam helps put UD on the map as a place that does cross-disciplinary climate work.
“We have excellent expertise in game design, climatology, engineering, ocean science, and environmental humanities,” Siders said. “But our real strength is our ability to put those together creatively.”
Members of the media who would like to interview Siders about the Climate Change Video Game Jam or other related topics can visit her profile and click "connect" or send an email to mediarelations@udel.edu.
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Biography
A.R. Siders is a director of the Gerard J. Mangone Climate Change Science and Policy Hub. She is an associate professor at the University of Delaware in the Disaster Research Center, the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration, and the department of Geography and Spatial Sciences in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. She holds a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD from the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University.
Dr. Siders' research focuses on climate change adaptation decision-making and evaluation: how and why communities decide when, where, and how to adapt to the effects of climate change and how these decisions affect risk reduction and justice. She has expertise on climate adaptation policy at local, state, and federal levels in the United States and international policy. Her current projects focus on adaptive capacity, managed retreat, and adaptation fairness. She co-edited a book and special issue on environmental justice and climate relocation, and she recently served as a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report and to the Fifth US National Climate Assessment (NCA5) and as a synthesis lead for the Global Adaptation Mapping Initiative. She has served as a technical advisor for the Louisiana Coastal Master Plan and worked with state and federal agencies and non-profits to recommend managed retreat program reforms. In 2024, she led the Climate Change Game Jam, a national video game design competition for US university students, as part of her work as an Oceans Champion with the National Science Foundation and UN Oceans Decade initiative. Siders currently serves as Lead Author for the Adaptation chapter of the 6th US National Climate Assessment (NCA6).
Managed retreat is a category of adaptation options where communities either don't build near to hazards or where people move away from the hazards. We tend to talk about managed retreat from the coasts, because sea level rise is one of the most visible and concrete consequences of global climate change, but managed retreat options are applicable in any flood-prone area.Siders recently collaborated with the University of Miami's Katharine J. Mach to provide a prospective roadmap for reconceptualizing the future using managed retreat. Siders and Mach argue that long-term adaptation will involve retreat. Even traditionally accepted visions of the future, like building flood walls and elevating threatened structures, will involve small-scale retreat to make space for levees and drainage. Larger-scale retreat may be needed for more ambitious transformations, such as building floating neighborhoods or cities, turning roads into canals in an effort to live with the water, or building more dense, more compact cities on higher ground.
There were once four scientists who decided to take a systematic approach to honing one of working life’s great skills: the art of saying no. ... “One of our big takeaways was that 100 declines collectively is great but it’s not enough,” said AR Siders, an associate professor at the University of Delaware.
For many Illinoisans in flood-prone areas, buyouts are the only way out
Capitol News Illinois print
2024-05-13
A state government home buyout program has helped hundreds of people move out of harm’s way. But for many, it takes too long. A.R. Siders comments on buyout policies and efforts to improve support for participants.
Delaware urged to step up climate action amid national calls for more adaptation
Delaware Public Media radio
2023-12-08
According to AR Siders some Delaware officials understand that the massive effects of a changing climate will require commensurate responses such as road relocations or revised building codes but that no such measures have yet been agreed, let alone implemented.
University of Delaware researcher one of 500 contributors to Fifth National Climate Assessment
The White House, United Nations online
2023-11-14
Leaders and practitioners highlighted the findings and raised awareness of climate impacts and solutions at a release event on Nov. 14. White House and climate leaders from across the country elevated the key themes of NCA5 and further highlight the Biden Administration’s whole-of-government approach to mitigating and adapting to climate change.
3 cities face a climate dilemma: to build or not to build homes in risky places
NPR online
2023-11-06
On a state level, New Jersey may offer a blueprint for how to get people out of harm's way while continuing to grow and prosper economically, said A.R. Siders, core faculty with UD's Disaster Research Center.
Wealthy buyers are flocking to Florida to rebuild mansions where modest homes were destroyed by hurricanes
Business Insider (India) online
2023-11-02
Wealthy buyers are flocking to Florida to rebuild mansions where modest homes were destroyed by hurricanes.
"This looks like a good short-term solution because it doesn't involve the government spending a lot of money," A.R. Siders, a professor at the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center, told Bloomberg. "In the long-term, it opens up a can of worms."
Ravaged Florida Town Becomes a Magnet for Risk-Taking Homebuyers
Bloomberg online
2023-10-30
Fort Myers Beach, destroyed by Hurricane Ian’s winds and flooding, is being remade by those who can afford to build stronger structures — and face future storms
How Biden’s newest climate initiative affects campus
The Review (UD's Independent Student Newspaper) online
2023-10-19
“I think there’s a trickle effect,” Siders said when talking about implementing climate mitigation policy. “As people … [we] see what becomes normal somewhere else, then that just that influences what people think is the norm is the standard what’s possible.”
Siders put forth that climate mitigation needs to be more involved in higher education. She also emphasized the need for climate knowledge in fields such as engineering.
No water, roads or emergency services: How climate change left a rural neighborhood nearly uninhabitable
Texas Tribune online
2023-09-29
Buyout programs are supposed to have protections that prevent local governments from removing critical services, said A.R. Siders, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware and member of the university’s Disaster Research Center. But in reality, as fewer people live in an area, it makes less sense to spend tax dollars there. And government officials are hesitant to trample on people’s property rights to force them to leave, she said.
“The idea of individual property rights treats it as though [homes] are isolated, but they’re not,” said Siders, one of the leading researchers on managed retreat. “...Those homes are very dependent on government systems: the roads, the water services, the septic systems, emergency services.”
‘We are not prepared’: Disasters spread as climate change strikes
Politico online
2023-07-15
In addition to coordinating disaster response, FEMA also runs the U.S. federal flood insurance program. And it simply is not ready to juggle the myriad perils that climate change is spitting out, said A.R. Siders, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware who focuses on disasters. “I think as a whole in the United States we are not prepared to deal with the effects of a changing climate,” she said. “We are doing too much in the reaction mode rather than the preparation mode.”
Climate change is causing people to move. They usually stay local, study finds
NPR
2023-06-15
It makes sense that people are moving only short distances, says A.R. Siders, a faculty member at the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. Most Americans who move for any reason do so within the same county, Siders says. "It's useful to see that, even when people are moving because of a flood-related program, they are staying close."
How to Convince Homeowners to Relocate Because of Climate Change
Route Fifty online
2023-06-06
“Sometimes it’s less about the data, and it’s more about how we communicate the data,” Siders said. For instance, the 100-year flood principle, which is often used to determine if a household requires flood insurance, asserts that a given area has a 1% chance of flooding annually. “The other way to think about that is … you have a 1 in 4 chance of your home flooding during the course of a mortgage,” [Siders] said.
To help translate complex ideas like flood risk to a community, Siders advised using data to tell a story. That means leveraging tools that make data relevant to the audience. “If you just show a flat map on a table or a chart of the data … it’s not effective at convincing them that there’s actual risk.”
What is Managed Retreat? A Controversial Climate Adaptation Scientists Say Is Inevitable
NBC6 South Florida tv
2023-05-16
We know that chaotic retreat happens after big disasters like Hurricane Irma, but managed retreat is trying to get out ahead of the problem.
“The general principles behind a managed retreat, what would make it different from chaotic retreat, are really having agency over the choice, so making it feel like people who are retreating making it feel like this is a choice for them," Siders said.
We urgently need to shift to strategic efforts that include sociocultural as well as physical factors and involve the whole country. As Professor A. R. Siders of the University of Delaware, a leading academic in the emerging field of strategic relocation, says, “A substantial amount of innovation and work—in both research and practice—will need to be done to make strategic [relocation] an efficient and equitable adaptation option at scale.”
The administrator’s dilemma: Closing the gap between climate adaptation justice in theory and practice
Environmental Science & Policy
2022
Justice theory is intended to guide practical choices, but justice theories struggle to inform many decisions that must be made in climate change adaptation practice. This paper highlights gaps between theory and practice by analyzing the justice dimensions of dilemmas routinely faced by adaptation administrators, using the example of property acquisitions to ground the analysis. Proposals to improve adaptation justice that do not address one or more of the practical dilemmas faced by administrators are unlikely to advance the cause. Justice decisions are often constrained by limited authority, resources, and institutional goals, so achieving greater justice in climate adaptation may require changes in the larger governance systems within which adaptation decisions are made. More nuanced evaluations of adaptation justice, more comparative analyses, enabled by greater transparency in practice, and more holistic approaches to adaptation governance are recommended moving forward.
A nationwide analysis of community-level floodplain development outcomes and key influences
Earth Futures
A. Agopian, M. Hino, A.R. Siders, C. Samoray, K. Mach
2024-07-08
Limiting development in floodplains reduces the assets and population exposed to flooding. We develop two indexes measuring floodplain development in 18,548 communities across the continental United States. Nationwide from 2001 to 2019, 2.1 million acres of floodplain land were developed, and 844,000 residential properties were built in the floodplain. However, contrary to conventional perceptions of rampant floodplain development, just 26% of communities nationwide have developed in floodplains more than would be expected given the hazard they face. The indexes and the analyses they enable can help guide targeted interventions to improve flood risk management, to explore underlying drivers of flood exposure, and to inform how local‐to‐federal policy choices can be leveraged to limit hazardous development. Data is publicly available via DesignSafe.
How local governments avoid floodplain development through consistent implementation of routine municipal ordinances, plans, and programs
Oxford Open Climate Change,
A R Siders, Jennifer Niemann-Morris, Miyuki Hino, Elizabeth Shields, Lidia Cano Pecharroman, Tess Doeffinger, Logan Gerber-Chavez, Ju-Ching Huang, Alexandra Lafferty, Salvesila Tamima, Caroline Williams, Armen Agopian, Christopher Samoray, Katharine J Mach
2024-09-19
Avoiding floodplain development is critical for limiting flood damage, yet there is little empirical evidence of how local governments effectively avoid floodplain development. We conduct a mixed-methods study in New Jersey and find that 85% of towns developed relatively little in the floodplain from 2001 to 2019. They achieved this with commonplace land use management tools and modest levels of local government capacity. One hundred twenty-six (126) New Jersey towns put none of their new housing in the floodplain 2001–2019. Our findings run counter to common reports of rampant floodplain development requiring legal innovation and capacity-building campaigns and suggest alternative approaches for promoting floodplain avoidance. We find multiple paths to floodplain avoidance, weak support for previously identified drivers, and strong evidence that the keys to avoidance include having a few high-quality tools that are well-implemented, requiring consistency, coordination, and commitment of local officials. Contrary to our expectations, we show that floodplain avoidance can be and is achieved through routine municipal practices.
Promoting Spatial Coordination in Flood Buyouts in the United States: Four Strategies and Four Challenges from the Economics of Land Preservation Literature
Natural Hazards Review
2023
Managed retreat in the form of voluntary flood-buyout programs provides homeowners with an alternative to repairing and rebuilding residences that have sustained severe flood damage. Buyout programs are most economically efficient when groups of neighboring properties are acquired because they can then create unfragmented flood control areas and reduce the cost of providing local services. However, buyout programs in the United States often fail to acquire such efficient, unfragmented spaces for various reasons, including the use of posted price mechanisms. In this paper, we describe four alternative strategies that have been used successfully in land-preservation agricultural–environmental contexts to increase acceptance rates and decrease fragmentation: agglomeration bonuses, reverse auctions, target constraints, and hybrid approaches. We discuss challenges that may arise during their implementation in the buyout context—transaction costs, equity and distributional impacts, unintended consequences, and social pressure—and recommend further research into the efficiency and equity of applying these strategies to residential buyout programs with the explicit goal of promoting spatial coordination.
A global assessment of policy tools to support climate adaptation
Climate Policy
2022
Policy tools can shape the type and extent of adaptation, and therefore, function either as barriers or enablers for reducing risk and vulnerability. Using data from a systematic review of academic literature on global adaptation responses to climate change (n = 1549 peer-reviewed articles), we categorize the types of policy tools used to shape climate adaptation. We assess the contexts where particular tools are used, equity implications for groups targeted by the tools, and transformational adaptation indicators such as the depth, scope, and speed of adaptation. We identify a mismatch between the tools that consider equity and those that yield more transformational adaptations. Direct regulations, plans, and capacity building are associated with higher depth and scope of adaptation (thus transformational adaptation), while economic instruments, information provisioning, and networks are not; the latter tools, however, are more likely to target marginalized groups in their design and implementation. We identify multiple research gaps, including a need to assess instrument mixes rather than single tools and to assess adaptations that result from policy implementation.
A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change
Nature Climate Change
2021
Assessing global progress on human adaptation to climate change is an urgent priority. Although the literature on adaptation to climate change is rapidly expanding, little is known about the actual extent of implementation. We systematically screened >48,000 articles using machine learning methods and a global network of 126 researchers. Our synthesis of the resulting 1,682 articles presents a systematic and comprehensive global stocktake of implemented human adaptation to climate change. Documented adaptations were largely fragmented, local and incremental, with limited evidence of transformational adaptation and negligible evidence of risk reduction outcomes. We identify eight priorities for global adaptation research: assess the effectiveness of adaptation responses, enhance the understanding of limits to adaptation, enable individuals and civil society to adapt, include missing places, scholars and scholarship, understand private sector responses, improve methods for synthesizing different forms of evidence, assess the adaptation at different temperature thresholds, and improve the inclusion of timescale and the dynamics of responses.
Climate Change Ethics in Harvestella: Weirding, Disquietude, Choice
Video Games and Environmental Humanities
Lowell Duckert, A.R. SIders
2024-10-22
On the surface, the combination role-playing-game-and-farm-simulation Harvestella (2022) is neither a climate change game, insofar as it never explicitly mentions climate change, nor an ethical game, insofar as it has no structured ethical framework. Yet the human-destroyed Earth, planetary colonization, and mission to “save the world” from a “season of death” evoke deeply controversial ethical debates about climate (in)action, responsibility, and redemption. By posing real-world ethical dilemmas in another world, the game fulfills some of the best virtues of speculative fiction. Plotlines and dialogue present urgent crises that the game mechanics actively prevent the player from resolving and that are easy to forget in the game’s beautiful aesthetics and strange blend of futuristic and fantastic elements. Player impotence in the face of a weird world marks Harvestella as a video game in the New Weird tradition, although the game eventually subverts the acceptance that characterizes that genre’s response to weirdness and lack of agency. In doing so, the game questions the ethical implications of ambivalence in the Anthropocene and poses difficult questions about the ethics of living in and during a time of catastrophe. Ultimately, Harvestella’s only meaningful decision point, whether to use the genocidal computer Protocol Harvestella, argues for a response to the crisis that is not New Weird ambivalence or Old Weird terror but a resolve to pursue a better future, even if that future is uncertain. In this light, Harvestella is both a climate change and ethical game and a novel example of both.
Siders is the Lead Author for the Adaptation chapter in the 6th National Climate Assessment. The NCA6 team will release a zero order draft for public comment in Summer 2025, and the chapter draft will be open for public comment in late 2026 or early 2027. The adaptation chapter will assess adaptation scholarship, practices, and gaps for future action, providing a robust scientific basis for US climate adaptation policy.
What roles do heritage, art, fiction, video games and board games play in climate change communication, in envisioning the future, and in our perceptions of adaptation justice? Siders has published on climate adaptation and heritage and climate change video games. In 2024, she received NSF funding as an Oceans Champion to host the first national Climate Change Game Jam, a video game design competition where college students designed novel games on oceans and climate change. In 2025, she received an NSF Special Creativity award to develop an experiment using a purpose-designed climate change video game to explore the effect of playing games on policy preferences for climate adaptation.
Collaborating with Dr. Miyuki Hino and Dr. Katharine Mach, funded by NSF HDBE, to investigate how and why some communities are able to grow without developing new housing in the floodplain. We created a national index to compare relative rates of floodplain development. We then used that index to explore how local laws and regulations are used to avoid or limit floodplain development. This project is supported by the National Science Foundation Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE) program.
The Coastal Hazards, Equity, Economic prosperity and Resilience (CHEER) Hub is a five-year, $16.5 million project funded by the National Science Foundation Coastlines and People (CoPe) program and housed in the Disaster Research Center at UD. Siders leads the government research team to improve integration of disaster policy and governance constraints into the CHEER dynamic model. Another project seeks to advance the use of equity in decision models by assessing how the way equity is defined affects recommended policies.
