Climate change is forcing a shift in the characteristics of many natural hazards. Alongside other trends–such as increasing global interdependence, the rate of population and economic growth, and widening social inequalities–the risk from climate-sensitive natural hazards presents an expanding source of danger across the world. Research and practice on climate risk began by establishing standards for assessing hazards and implementing structural solutions to mitigate consequences. The field has evolved since then to include behavioral decision making and the multidimensionality in differences among people and places as determinants of exposure and vulnerability, respectively. These paradigm shifts in selecting factors for climate risk assessment happened alongside developments in modeling divergences between statistical and perceived risk as well as policy and scientific attention towards the distribution of hazards along socioeconomic and demographic lines. This dissertation, Three Essays on Climate Risk, contributes to answering pressing questions in climate risk research. The first essay, ‘Validating Social Vulnerability in Disaster Loss Models’ suggests that climate risk assessments should account for social vulnerability but practice caution since the relative contribution of social indicators varies across climate hazards. In the second essay, ‘Social and Spatial Inequalities in Climate Hazard Distributions,’ we compared multiple inequality metrics to find that exposure heterogeneously varies across metrics by choice of demographic​ and​ geographic partitioning. Researchers should therefore carefully design studies based upon theories of inequality formation and policy relevance. Preliminary results from the third essay, ‘Measuring Climate Risk Perception with Twitter Data,’ indicate that user-generated big data may soon serve as an appropriate supplement to survey data for measuring complex socio-cognitive phenomena. These essays advance climate risk measurement & modeling, unpack geographies of climate risk, and illustrate implications of improving climate risk information.

Traditional development perspectives follow the modernization paradigm and international development research has largely focused on urban and rural spaces as distinct entities. Recently however, the academic community has recognized the necessity of understanding how households in the developing world utilize different types of spaces to make a living, but little research has explicitly addressed this. This dissertation helps to fill this gap by using mixed-methods research in Guatemala to determine how household occupations are changing over time for both rural and urban households, and whether this change is improving household well-being.

Analysis of both secondary data and data originally collected by the author are utilized to address research questions. Three time points of nationally representative survey data from Guatemala (2006, 2011, and 2015) are used in chapter two to determine if the prevalence of households in different occupation types - operating their own farm, working as paid agricultural labor, or working outside of agriculture - are changing over time. In chapter three, the 2015 nationally representative survey data is used to determine if household occupation type (as classified in chapter two) associates with food insecurity. Last, in chapter four, household survey data collected in four peri-urban communities in the department of Peten, Guatemala are used to expand understanding of how occupation type impacts food insecurity. Instead of classifying jobs into three occupation types, working outside of agriculture is split into two occupation types based on the location of work, either urban or rural, creating four occupation types to include in statistical models examining associates of food insecurity.

The results of the dissertation highlight development trajectories in Guatemala. Results from chapter two indicate that working as paid agricultural labor is increasing in prevalence in Guatemala while neither the prevalence of own-farm operation or working outside of agriculture are changing over time. Results from chapter three suggest that households working as paid agricultural labor are the most likely to be food insecure, followed by households working outside of agriculture, and last, by households operating their own farm. Last, results from chapter four (field work data) suggest that households working in urban areas are the most food insecure and that there are no differences in food insecurity between households that operate their own farm, work as paid agricultural labor, or work outside of agriculture in the rural space.

In conclusion, despite following the neoliberal economic model of many developed countries, household well-being in Guatemala, at least as measured by food insecurity status, is not improving. Within rural areas, more and more households are relying on paid agricultural work, but this type of work is associated with the greatest likelihood of food insecurity. Furthermore, while the share of the country’s population living in urban areas is increasing, working in urban areas isn’t associated with better food security, suggesting that this aspect of the development modernization paradigm is not holding true. It seems that subsistence agriculture (own-account farming) creates the greatest amount of food security for households in Guatemala, yet it receives little support from the Guatemalan government. In light of these findings, it may benefit household well-being in Guatemala if governmental and non-governmental organizations increase support for agricultural laborers. While more research is needed to verify mechanisms to do so, raising minimum pay, limiting the maximum number of hours in the work day, and enforcing these standards may benefit individuals and households in rural and peri-urban communities.

The last two decades have seen a broadening of the scope of public health that has resulted in a ``spatial turn" in a field that is inherently spatial. The increased role for Geography is particularly clear when considering local public health practice. Several factors have contributed to this including increased interest in the Social Determinants of Health which are sometimes characterized as attributes of place. This has resulted in a focus on neighborhood or ``context" effects on health including attributes of the built environment, demographic characteristics, and environmental measures. Simultaneously, there has been rapid acceleration in the availability and timeliness of data at fine geographic, demographic, and temporal resolution, and an emphasis on open data and inter-sectoral collaboration. This has enabled the timely, systematic characterization of communities or neighborhoods.

This dissertation presents three projects demonstrating the value of geography in public health surveillance in New York City. Surveillance is one of the core functions of public health and has been called the ``essential feature of epidemiologic practice.'' Traditionally, surveillance has been used for communicable disease outbreak detection and emergency response. However, in the current data context, the systematic, timely, and detailed characterization of populations and communities including health behaviors, outcomes including chronic disease, and social determinants of health is possible and facilitates all aspects of public health practice and policy making. The projects presented here further that goal by developing methods for the detailed characterization of spatial and demographic patterns.

First, the construction of area-based poverty measures (ABPMs) for surveillance is presented. ABPMs can be used to measure and monitor disparities and track progress towards published goals. Second, a system for the timely characterization of child mental health outcomes is developed. The system can be used to target mental health services and evaluate the impact of ThriveNYC, an extensive preventive mental health program. Finally, a quantile regression framework for child BMI is presented. This has the potential to greatly increase the amount of information used in characterizing childhood obesity including spatial and demographic patterns. Together these projects provide actual use cases for the central role of geography in local government.

The objective of this dissertation is to challenge a common assumption in demography and a prevailing development narrative that increases in women’s empowerment is a cause of fertility decline. The association between women’s empowerment and fertility is studied with a place-based approach in the context of West Africa where fertility rates are high with much variability, and where “empowerment” may not share the same meaning between researchers and research participants.

In “The Geography of Women’s Empowerment in West Africa”, I test the association between various putative indicators of women’s empowerment contained in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in West African countries, using multivariate methods to identify classifications of empowerment to see if there is evidence of it as a unidimensional phenomenon. I test for spatial association among the empowerment classification (outcome) and determine if responses to women’s empowerment questions vary significantly geographically across the region.

In “The Role of Men’s and Women’s Agency in Fertility in Dakar, Senegal” I do a more in-depth analysis of the relationship between agency and fertility focusing on Senegal and its capital region, Dakar. Using an iterative, mixed-methods approach I use fieldwork conducted in Dakar to inform the analysis and interpretation of DHS data, using statistical methods. The results of this study show no consistent significant relationship between women’s and men’s agency and either fertility preferences or fertility outcomes. Furthermore, this study sheds light on a cultural ideal and preference favoring cooperative decision-making over individual autonomy among men and women in Dakar.

In “Partner Cooperation, Family Planning, and Contraceptive Effectiveness” I investigate how the degree of cooperation that women have in their relationships with their partners may influence contraceptive effectiveness by analyzing associations between relationship cooperation and interbirth interval most proximate to the survey date. While this study failed to show an association between relationship cooperation and contraceptive effectiveness, results do show that relationship cooperation has a significant and positive effect on interbirth interval length regardless of contraceptive method use. This suggests that women in more cooperative relationships are better able to successfully postpone pregnancy, particularly when not using contraception.

Overall, this dissertation provides a compelling case against the association of empowerment and fertility in West Africa and compels future work in unpacking the empowerment concept into observable constituents that can be analyzed separately in their possible linkages with fertility. This dissertation also underscores the importance of population geography in conducting place-based research when studying fertility and associated culturally-contingent processes.

Well-resourced urban school gardens can provide extensive and varying benefits for students, operating simultaneously within a tradition of community transformation through urban farming, and the U.S. public education system. Benefits of school gardens include empowering, affirming, and engaging activities and relationships; knowledge about food and environmental systems; improved nutrition; stress relief; increased physical activity; and experiential education – but these benefits occur within an unequal society in which certain benefits and harms are more likely to occur based on race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other identity markers. One of many disparate risks is the exposure to environmental toxins in urban landscapes.

Using statistical analysis of surveys from adult and student school gardeners, soil samples, NYC Department of Education School Survey data, and public inventories of hazardous waste sites; as well as qualitative analysis of adult interviews and student open-ended responses, this dissertation addresses the overarching questions: How do school gardens provide personal and social benefits to students while minimizing environmental risks? What factors affect the distribution of these outcomes, and is the distribution just? Theoretical framing used to guide analysis is derived largely from social determinants of health, critical race theory, food justice, environmental justice, and social capital literature.

I investigate social, economic, and environmental disparities in Brooklyn, NY middle and high school gardens. Some of the main findings include: The budget and administrative support received by gardens increases with the school proportion of white students (n = 24 schools) (Chapter 1); White male students report the highest feelings of affirmation in the garden space, replicating a disparity that is also recurrent in classroom settings (n = 122 students) (Chapter 2); The number of hazardous waste sites near schools with gardens increases with the school proportion of Black and Hispanic/Latinx students, and with the proportion of low-income students (n = 31 schools) (Chapter 4). Lastly, in a chapter highlighting students’ direct words, I explore the potential of school gardens to promote liberation for racially minoritized students, proposing a four-part framework that builds on movements for justice with which the garden intersects (Chapter 3). Overall, the dissertation explores the benefits and shortcomings of Brooklyn, NY school garden spaces with a focus on marginalized student populations.

This dissertation presents four distinct applications in Population and Health Geography. While varied, in each of these applications I center geographic constructs (space, time, exposure and scale), and implement a specific study design (often with novel methods and/or measures) to elucidate these themes in context. In particular, I trace the challenges of measuring exposure, effects, and uncertainty through each application. In the first application I use historical wildfire evacuation zones to identify wildfire exposed populations and investigate the relationship between wildfire exposure and cardiovascular events. For the second application, I describe and test a new time use data collection method in the context of existing tools and simulation models. In the third application I introduce a statistical model into wildfire vulnerability index construction and discuss implications for spatial variability. For the final application I construct a novel indirect measure of school climate and combine multiple data sources to explore mental health variation across school districts in New York City. Together these applications demonstrate the natural partnership of Geography and Statistics in social science.