Christopher Burton

Christopher Burton is a geographer interested in the application of geospatial analysis and modeling techniques to human-environmental interactions. In 2007, Christopher received his M.S. in Geography from the University of South Carolina, and he will receive his PhD in Geography in the spring of 2012. Christopher's graduate training was centered within the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute (HVRI) at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on hazard vulnerability and disaster resilience in order to gain insight into adverse impacts from natural hazard events to provide guidance for sustainable policy actions that can enhance disaster loss reduction. Christopher has authored and co-authored a multitude of peer reviewed journal articles on such topics. These works include an evaluation of the extent to which a quantified measure of social vulnerability can be incorporated into numerical hurricane impact modeling, an assessment of the multivariate nature of vulnerability to Cascadia tsunamis, the examination of the spatial variability in the vulnerability of residents to potential levee failures in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region of California, and an evaluation of the spatial and temporal progression of recovery of Mississippi coastal communities following Hurricane Katrina. His recent work involved the development of an integrated hazards assessment portal for the state of South Carolina (http://webra.cas.sc.edu/ihat). The primary purpose of this application is to visualize and map hazard frequencies, social vulnerability, and event information to enable informed vulnerability assessments that conform to U.S. Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 standards.

Christopher has been selected for and honored with several distinguished achievements. These include the Jeanne X. Kasperson Paper Award of the Association of American Geographers. He was also a selected participant in the Institute for Integration of Research on Climate Change and Hazards in the Americas in Panama City, Panama. The event was co-organized by the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the Pan-American Institute for Geography and History (PAIGH), the US Geological Survey (USGS), the National Communication Association (NCA), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). This workshop focused on the development of a research agenda for climate change and Natural Hazards in the Americas.