In the spring, she's going to be teaching a course. You're not teaching this, but in the spring, you're teaching a course called Media and Climate Change. Media and Climate Change, do you remember if that's process for graduate students? I believe it is, yes. I think it is. Even if it weren't, you could always take it up for the grad students in the room as an independent study in the system that way. But anyway, I encourage you to take a look at that class if you're looking for an elective for the spring. Currently, Liz is writing her first book, which is called Retreat, Moving to Higher Ground in a Climate Change City. It's under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Congratulations, an excellent press. And one of the things I like about colloquium is that we bring in people at a lot of different stages of their career. Actually, someone recently had an undergrad from MIT, but more often, it'll be someone right out of grad school, someone mid-career, often past two speakers have been senior scholars. And so I think in addition to the specific research that Liz is presenting today, I'm sure she would be amenable to answering questions about, well, how do you change a dissertation into a book, or any kind of schoolwork into a publishable work? What are some of the issues there? So feel free to ask her questions about that. Retreat, the book that she's working on is based on field work that she did in Staten Island for four years after Hurricane Sandy, where residents elected to relocate in favor of return and return the waterfront neighborhoods to wetlands rather than rebuilding. And given her interest in climate change and hurricanes and flood maps and FEMA, this feels like a particularly urgent moment to be talking about these kinds of issues. And I suspect that she could answer questions related to the crisis moment in hurricanes and hurricane recovery and so on, in addition to speaking specifically about Hurricane Sandy. Before coming to MIT, Liz received a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, an MSc in Culture and Society from the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and a BA in Communication and Spanish and Latin American Literature from George Washington University. So join me in welcoming her to the stage. Thank you. Thank you so much, Heather. Thank you all for coming out this afternoon slash evening to hear this talk. As Heather said, I'll be presenting some research from my dissertation, but then some newer material that's also from that, but it's material I haven't presented before, and I'm still really working through. So I'm looking forward to our conversation and to hearing your thoughts and all of that. I know for those of you who have an abiding interest in climate change and hurricanes, Carrie Emanuel is giving a talk at 6.30 at MIT. So some of you might be trying to go to that. So I won't. I'll kind of dive right in. No pun intended. You don't realize until you're writing about water how much, how many water, watery metaphors there are everywhere. So I'll speak for maybe 30 to 40, 45 minutes, and then leave a lot of time for discussion and questions. OK. So on October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the east coast of the United States, and I know. Heather was saying you remember that night vividly. Probably a number of us here remember that night vividly. In New York City, where I was living at the time, the borough of Staten Island was particularly hard hit. This is the neighborhood on the east shore. Staten Island had the highest recorded water levels in the city. It had the most deaths in the city, and it had the greatest proportion of residents affected of any borough. And neighborhoods like this one have suffered repeated flooding over the years. And my research works to understand what will happen to these neighborhoods and to others like them as climate change increases the risks that they already face.  And that will be some of what I speak about today. Now, climate change is necessarily mediated. Paul Edwards has a wonderful book called A Vast Machine, and he points out in that book that climate is the history of weather. So like other forms of history, climate can't be perceived directly.  And that's made up of model data, of technical systems, institutions, such as the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and so on. So this graph is one product of that infrastructure, and it likely looks familiar to many of you. It shows average global temperature increasing at an unprecedented rate, tracking carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So even if the powers that be stopped burning fossil fuels right now, carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere. It continues to have a warming effect for upwards of a century after its release. So what this means is that even as we work to mitigate climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, we also have to work to adapt to the impacts that are already baked into the system. And enough, there's been enough warming locked in to ensure substantial disruption to everyday life in many places. And data, models, and technology are becoming more sophisticated, more powerful, and fine-tuned. So this has made it possible to measure climate change and its effects on more local levels as well, and to create more local level predictions. And this graph is from the latest report of the New York City Panel on Climate Change. And it shows that average annual temperatures as measured in Central Park in New York have increased 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. In this area, I was looking up trends for Boston because I realized having lived in New York for until this summer, my talk is kind of New York-centric, so I'm trying to make it more Boston and Cambridge-specific. There was a very interesting report called the Climate-Ready Boston Report that was released this past December. And it notes here summers by 2050, maybe as hot as Washington DC's summers are today. And by the end of this century, they may be hotter than Birmingham, Alabama's summers are today in Boston. This is another graph from the New York City report. And it shows that there's already been one foot of observed sea level rise as measured at the Battery in Lower Manhattan over the past century. So this is a foot of sea level rise that's already happened. And a foot doesn't sound like that much. But this extra foot of water is estimated to have added approximately $2 billion to Sandy's toll in New York City and to have flooded an extra 100,000 people in New York and New Jersey who would not have flooded without that extra foot of water. So it makes a big difference. In New York Harbor and along much of the eastern seaboard, sea levels are rising at more than double the global average rate. This is due to a number of factors, ocean currents, wind patterns, the diminishing gravitational pull of melting ice caps that right now are kind of pulling the sea up towards the poles, and also land that's also subsiding. So the land in this part of the country is sinking, too. And rates of sea level rise are increasing exponentially. And they'll continue to do so if emissions continue unabated. This is an image I took from Climate Central's Surging Seas website, which I really recommend going to and kind of playing around with it lets you set a lot of different scenarios and see what comes out. And this map shows projected inundation in Cambridge and Boston if global average temperature increases 1.5 degrees Celsius. So that's an amount that some would argue is already locked in. Now we're warming to increase to two degrees, the long-term sea level rise could change the map of this area to something like this. So this is the difference 1.5, 2. That's three degrees. And that's four degrees, which most resembles the kind of track that we're currently on in terms of our emissions. Any one of these scenarios, even the lowest emission scenario, still promises a huge amount of disruption. But what this will look like depends not only on the extent of warming and its effects, but also on the ways that those effects and their attendant risks are measured and mapped and managed. And that will be the focus of the talk. Now, practices of renapping and rezoning land based on environmental risk have been rapidly expanding worldwide. You get maps like these that visualize everything from mosquito vectors to landslide risk.  Those are the words of map historian Mark Monmeneur. He has some great, great work on risk and hazard maps specifically. So I'll quote from him now. Acceptance of cartographic simulation and risk assessment as normal and necessary, he writes, may prove as monumental a turning point in public administration as they accept in centuries ago of boundary maps, without which land ownership, taxation, and zoning would be impossible. So the questions this raises are, what are the stakes of this emerging genre of maps? What kinds of things do they afford? How are they made? How are they used? How are they experienced? And how are people contesting them? And from my point of view, at a moment when climate change is rendering any kind of notion of a fixed or stable landscape increasingly untenable, what role can maps play in helping us navigate a profoundly uncertain and contingent future? So these are big questions. And I will only just start exploring them today. And to do that, I want to take you back to Staten Island after Sandy and tell you the story of an encounter with one very particular but very powerful set of maps. So this is a photo of a neighborhood called Oakwood Beach, also on Staten Island's east shore. For those of you familiar with New York City, up in the top left corner, you can just make out the outline of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. That connects Staten Island to Brooklyn. And then further beyond that is Lower Manhattan. So in this image, you can see houses that were swept entirely off their foundations into the surrounding wetlands by a storm surge that was more than 14 feet the night of Sandy. But Sandy was not the first time that Oakwood Beach was devastated by a storm. In 1992, a nor'easter flooded the neighborhood. And it led a group of residents there to form what they called the Oakwood Beach Flood Victims Committee. So this group of residents got together and they spent years lobbying for better coastal protection and for an end to new development in the wetlands. But little came of their efforts. And then 20 years after this nor'easter, Sandy hits. Sandy killed three people in Oakwood Beach, which is a very close-knit neighborhood. And it was the final straw for many, many residents there. One week after the storm, this letter to the editor appeared on the website of Staten Island's Daily Newspaper. And the author, Tina Downer, she was a longtime resident of Oakwood Beach. And she wrote about her years living in the neighborhood. She had been a member of this original flood victims committee. And she wrote that she deeply loved her neighborhood and loved living there. But she decided after Sandy that it was no longer a safe place to live. And not long after Tina's letter appeared, she helped organize a community meeting for her neighbors to get together and discuss their collective future. More than 200 people showed up at that meeting. And to Tina's surprise and to the surprise of others present, they voted nearly unanimously to pursue a buyout of their homes. So this meant, as Heather mentioned, that rather than stay and rebuild and keep fighting indefinitely for flood protection, that might never really come. They wanted the government to pay them enough money to relocate and then to return their neighborhood to wetlands that could provide some kind of protective buffer for their neighbors for their inland. So this is what's known as managed retreat, the relocating people and unbuilding of land in places vulnerable to flooding, sea level rise, and other effects of climate change. And after that meeting, when they realized the kind of overwhelming interest in a neighborhood buyout, some members of that original flood victims committee and some others present created a new committee that they called the Oakwood Beach Buyout Committee. And they created a plan and they started pushing it to local, city, and state officials. And so this time, they were successful. Less than three months later, New York State's governor, Andrew Cuomo, came down to Staten Island and he announced his support for a pilot buyout of that neighborhood. He said, homeowners who opted to participate in the program would be paid the pre-storm value of their damaged houses and you saw the condition of some of these houses totally, totally gone. And that the state would then return the properties to open space and prohibit any future development in those places. So when news of the Oakwood Beach Buyout broke, at first it seemed like an anomaly. Even in places with recurrent disasters and even in the kind of New York, New Jersey region after Sandy, people generally do not relocate. They decide to rebuild in place and post-disaster policies are geared towards rebuilding homes and infrastructure where they were before. But before long, I watched as residents in other neighborhoods along Staten Island's shore began organizing their own local buyout committees, pressing the state to expand its program to include them too. So this is a picture I took in the neighborhood of Ocean Breeze. That's just up the shore from Oakwood Beach. I think you can probably read the sign from there before the audio's sake. I'll read it. Governor Cuomo, Ocean Breeze needs your buyout through exclamation points. This is a picture I took at a meeting in Crescent Beach. It says, Governor Cuomo, desperate, will work for buyout. And this is in South Beach. One of the signs reads, Governor Cuomo, senior, sick, tired, broke, buy me out, please. And this is from the neighborhood of Grand Beach.  Buy us out and give it back. In the weeks and months after Sandy, these resident organized buyout groups formed all along Staten Island's east and south shores. You could see Oakwood Beach, that first neighborhood is right in the middle. But not everyone thought that redrawing the city's coastline in this way was a good idea. So the mayor at the time, Michael Bloomberg, came out strongly against retreat, which he described as not only futile, given the hundreds of thousands of people who live in New York City's floodplain, but also was an abandonment, effectively, of the waterfront. He said, as New Yorkers, we cannot and will not abandon our waterfront. We must protect it, not retreat from it. Rather than prohibit future development as the state plan would do, Bloomberg proposed doing the opposite. So he created this housing recovery program called Build It Back, aptly named, that offered homeowners who wanted to relocate roughly the same amount of money as a buyout, but the city would retain the right to flip the land to developers who promised to rebuild in a more flood resilient manner. So what happened is you wound up with these kind of competing government programs, competing visions of what the coast should look like in the future. And the question was, how do you determine which people get to go into which program?  So an obvious solution, here's where we get to, to the maps, is to use a risk map. And indeed, officials initially proposed to use the flood maps shown here, which are produced by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to determine who would be eligible for retreat versus redevelopment. So these maps are pretty boring to look at. They're not boring, substantively, but. Like many other official maps, they're probably intentionally boring. Their neutral appearance kind of works to convey the sense of objectivity, neutrality, and they're predominantly grayscale, as you can see. And these matterings of little polka dots, black and blue, delineate three general flood zones. So you have zones V, A, and X. And V and A are the ones shaded in blue here, and those together make up the special flood hazard area. So this is also called the 100-year flood plain, which probably is a familiar term, because it's kind of come up a lot in articles after these more recent storms, too. And it's a pretty misleading term. The 100-year flood is a very misleading term, because it actually refers to a flood that has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year. And this means, as FEMA's website kind of points out, that it has at least a 26% chance of occurring over the course of a 30-year mortgage. It's not once every 100 years at all. So it's kind of, yeah, a misleading term. And the proposal after Sandy, initially, was that homeowners in zone V, so V and A are the same risk of flooding, but V is a kind of additional risk of wind-driven storm surge. The V stands for velocity, the velocity zone. So they said homeowners in zone V, the highest risk zone, would be eligible to apply for a state buyout. But homeowners in zone A, the other part of the high-risk flood zone, would only be able to sell their land to the city for redevelopment. So probably very, not surprisingly, this was a very controversial way of bounding retreat. And as of the case with most official boundaries, the lines on FEMA's maps transgressed social boundaries. So they divided up streets. They divided up neighborhoods. They divided up, in some cases, attached houses. And they divided the buyout groups that had already started organizing and making their own maps of people in their neighborhoods who wanted to relocate. And this kind of top-down targeting of areas for retreat has a very ignominious history. This image was published shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. And it showed parts of that city that some planners and officials proposed to be returned to green space rather than rebuilt. It came to be known as the green dot map. And it incited a huge amount of debate. Infuriated people who were angry, not just at the idea that government would dictate who could and could not return to the city and rebuild. But also because this image appeared to target largely low-income black neighborhoods to the exclusion of wealthier, wider areas that were still themselves heavily flooded. So people very much took it as a continuation of discriminatory urban renewal agendas under the new guise of resiliency planning and disaster recovery. And that was kind of the story of Katrina across many aspects of New Orleans. And these histories of forced relocation and segregated development have contributed to what's now a very unequal exposure of people in places to risk in the present. So any risk map also has this social history underlying it, underlying who it maps and who it affects. And risk maps are very complicit in that history. So probably the most infamous kind of risk map is a redlining map, a neighborhood risk rating map. And obviously we're still living with the legacies of those now. And so in Staten Island, it was very different. Many of the hardest hit areas were made up largely of white working and middle-class homeowners. And residents there faulted the maps for erasing a different history. And that history was the historical production of flood risk over time. So there was a time in the living memory of some of the people who were still on the shore when the line between land and water in these neighborhoods was much less clear cut than it appears now on FEMA's maps. That was a time when the neighborhood's bungalows sat on pilings in the wetlands. It's an old photo of ocean breeze. And older residents, when you talk to them, have memories of catching eels off their docks and getting into tubes and going all the way out into the ocean. But during their lifetimes, these creeks and wetlands were filled in. And so now they say the water just has nowhere left to go. The construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which I pointed out earlier, connecting Staten Island to the rest of New York City for the first time in 1964, spurred development all along the shore. And not long after the bridge opened, the National Flood Insurance Act made flood insurance affordable and easily accessible. And that helped subsidize coastal real estate development nationwide. I'll make a note of this, because I will come back to the National Flood Insurance Program in a minute. This was true on Staten Island, where new housing started going up on what had been mainly agricultural land. Wetlands were filled in and the population of the boroughs soared exponentially. And then flooding got worse. You have more impermeable surfaces, more people and property in the way. A lot of areas don't have any kind of drainage infrastructure at all. But development kept going up. Housing was built at a really frenetic and unplanned pace. And here you can see a new house and a road built right in the wetlands. That's a pretty common site when you get to the end of a road. And then it just kind of dead ends into this huge expanse of fragmities, reeds that grow way higher than your head. It's really odd to feel like you're still in New York City, but you're there. And then there was more flooding. So now that neighborhood in the old photo, Ocean Breeze looks like this. And this is not a picture from after Sandy. This is just what it looks like after kind of a normal or now more normal, very heavy rainfall. And it's not unusual on a sunny day like this to see kind of ducks and geese swimming in the lakes that linger in the middle of these streets. So people will rename, they'll say it's Lake Kissum or something instead of Kissum Avenue. So really chronic, chronic flooding issues. And the biogrups that formed after Sandy were concentrated in these places that historically used to be wetlands. There's that map again. And these were also the deadliest places to be in the city during Sandy. This is a map from WNYC. The red dots are people who died in the storm. And it shows that the highest concentration of deaths was in this part of the shore that residents call the bowl. This includes Ocean Breeze. And they call it the bowl because now there's a waterfront boulevard that runs between these neighborhoods and divides them from the ocean. And that boulevard has raised about 10 feet above sea level. And so the streets behind it sit much lower. And what happened in Sandy is the water rose fairly slowly but then when it overtopped that boulevard it rushed into those neighborhoods and filled them up rapidly which left people very little time to escape. So of course, human caused climate change has also contributed to the production of flood risk over time. So the risk in these areas is not the same as it was when the older residents were living there when they were younger. But Biocrups in Staten Island which is the city's most conservative borough really focused on the story of the past that I just related here. They would say, it's not about kind of effects of climate change coming in the future. You need to go back and understand a story to understand why we wanna move. And they argue that these places weren't safe to live. Certainly not because of future climate change necessarily not even because of the present impacts of Sandy but because of these historic development decisions that placed blame very squarely on government and justified them pursuing this government by out of their homes. So these are a couple of quotes from people I spoke to. One says, the city allowed development. They allowed them to fill in the creeks and the wetlands. A big part of me says they did this. This is a problem that was created when people spoke of their neighbors who had been fighting for years as with the Oakwood Beach Group to get better protection. And they said, my heart breaks for someone who really fought and had the foresight to see that these things can happen but no one was listening until the storm. Now FEMA's maps by contrast, they depict flood risk as very much sort of the static and natural attribute of a place not the kind of dynamic and escalating result of human action or decisions that are made from afar. And they also reverse the relationship between citizens and government as Staten Islanders were talking about it. So government by authoring the maps, they become the ones who have the foresight and they're able to kind of predict flooding. And these maps wind up making flood prone residents themselves personally responsible, at least financially responsible for that risk. And so this is probably the most controversial aspect of these maps and this is why they're controversial not just for people who wanted buyouts but for people all across the country, including here. And that's because the maps are a product of the National Flood Insurance Program that I mentioned before and that has underwritten so much development in the flood plains and along the coast. Let me go back to this. So if you squint in the bottom corner here, you can make out firm. These maps are officially called firms that stands for flood insurance rate map. Do any of you own homes in FEMA's? Do any of you own homes? Probably not, I don't know. You do, isn't it? Do you know if it's in a flood zone? It's high up. That's great, for now. So if any of you did own homes and had mortgages and did live in one of FEMA's flood zones, you would be familiar with the intended use of these maps, so their intended use is to set flood insurance rates nationwide for the National Flood Insurance Program. And you're required if you hold a federally backed mortgage and you're in zones ARV, you're required to carry and maintain this flood insurance. So the fact that these maps are a product of the NFIP is relevant not just in terms of how they represent or misrepresent the past, but also how they're visualizing the future. Because of the congressional mandate they have to map risk specifically for insurance purposes, they represent flood risk very differently than many other kinds of flood maps that you might see. So these, this is a picture, I just got offline of flood maps in the UK, which are made by the Environment Agency. There's a great article about these maps that I'm gonna talk about now as I talk about them by James Porter and David Demerit. And so they write about how the Environment Agency makes these flood maps that are drawn on much larger scale than the ones I just showed you from FEMA. And that's intentionally so that they don't affect insurance rates for individual properties. And it also makes them a lot less expensive to maintain and to create. It's very hard to, I mean, you can't map these things perfectly accurately at all. It's a hypothetical third coastline, if you'd call it. But it's very hard to have anything approaching any kind of accuracy if you're at a smaller scale. And this has the added benefit from the Environment Agency's point of view in the UK of creating uncertainty that's enough so that when local planning authorities want to plan a development or permit a development, they're forced to go to the Environment Agency and the Environment Agency gets to have a role in consulting on the project, which they might not have otherwise. So they're created to not be that specific to read. And the UK maps too, as you can see here, they show Central London, that's Westminster. They show flood zones as they would exist without present flood defenses. So if those flood defenses that are currently in place, like the TEMS flood barrier, were to fail. And FEMA's maps do not do that. In the case of FEMA maps, FEMA certified flood defenses, such as levies constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, change the maps. And they remove areas that the defenses purport to protect from the high-risk flood zone entirely. So that means that people behind those barriers are no longer required to carry flood insurance, even though they're still living in the same place. And the result this has is it may render the land safe from kind of escalating flood insurance rates, but it remains very vulnerable, of course, to the kind of catastrophic failure you get when those defenses fail, and they almost inevitably fail, whether because they're not adequately maintained, like most of the infrastructure in this country, or because there is an exceptionally strong event that ends up breaching them. So in the great Midwest floods in the 90s, more than a thousand levies failed along rivers. And of course, Hurricane Katrina. And FEMA's maps also do not take climate change into account. Their mandate as insurance tools is to model present-day levels of risk based on historic data. And so they're actually not allowed to incorporate the impact of climate change into the maps. And as one mapper explained this to me, he said, I have a flood insurance policy myself, and even I make the maps, and I don't wanna pay more today based on risk that someone's projecting in the future. That would not be fair. And the future, of course, is not going to look like the past. The present doesn't look like the past. And you wind up with this mismatch between past and future conditions that has become a major issue for the maps now because they're also used, they're not just used to set flood insurance rates. They're also used to set building standards, building elevation standards. So in the words of the same FEMA mapper, he said, the problem is you're using a map that shows today's risk to tell someone how to build something that's going to be around for 30 years or 50 years, and that no longer is viable. Because even present conditions are changing much faster than the maps can keep up. This is a very blurry image, but it shows that in New York City, Sandy's floodwater surged far beyond FEMA's high-risk flood zone. The orange is the Sandy Inundation Area, and the blue is the 100-year floodplain from the FEMA maps that were currently in effect, which dated actually to 1983, so not that recent. And in Sandy, more than 21 square miles of flooded land lay outside both zones, A and B. So another reason that residents who were looking for buyouts were angry about the use of FEMA's maps to set the boundaries of the program was that the maps didn't take Sandy's damage into account. Even the new maps don't take Sandy's damage into account because FEMA was actually revising its maps when the storm hit, and this created a huge number of problems that were unexpected. The revisions were taking place as part of broader reforms to the National Flood Insurance Program that were passed, kind of shockingly, with bipartisan support this summer before Sandy. And these reforms are set to dramatically increase the cost of flood insurance in FEMA's flood zones by removing subsidies on properties that predate the creation of the program and predate the creation of the maps. So when the National Flood Insurance Program was first created, the government didn't want to create a program that would displace people en masse who were already living in vulnerable areas or in the flood plain. So what they did is they built in subsidies into the program, and this also allowed more people to afford to be able to buy into the program and then spreading the risk around. But the program has gotten deeper and deeper and deeper into debt, and so there are a lot of voices now pushing to raise, to get rid of all those subsidies entirely and raise premiums to market rates, but that would be many, many thousands of dollars for some people. So suddenly any changes to the maps have much higher stakes than they even did initially. And those seeking to rebuild and stay in their homes after Sandy started arguing that the new maps were overstating their risk. They threatened to set property values plummeting and to set off a wave of displacement that would be far more destructive than anyone disaster. Not just these pictures are from New Jersey, not just in New Jersey, but all across the country. And this is a very ongoing debate. So just weeks after FEMA released its first preliminary revised maps, which it did shortly before Oakwood Beach got its buyout. Oakwood Beach's buyout, they just looked at the map that residents made. They did not look at these flood maps yet because they didn't realize how much demand there would be for the program. There wasn't the need to kind of parse who would get it and who wouldn't at that stage. But just weeks after FEMA released its first maps, it released a new version of new maps that maintained this kind of expanded 100 year flood plain but then shrank the highest risk V zone within it. So this of course is from Staten Island Daily newspaper. This was bad news for Staten Islanders that thought at the time they needed to be in the V zone in order to have a shot of getting bought out and it made the map seem even more political than people were otherwise arguing them to be. So they started making the opposite case of the people you saw in the previous slide. So they started arguing the maps were actually understating their risk because they knew that unless they could show sufficient risk, they wouldn't get the support they needed to move. And the maps were still not yet final. So they have remained in flux because New York City then proceeded to launch its own appeal of the maps. Boston also appealed its latest flood maps I learned on the internet today. So the city launched an appeal of the maps. The city said the maps are still too severe. And so here in the orange, you can see this is what the city analysis shows they believe the 1% annual chance flood plain should be and the purple is what FEMA has been saying it should be. And it was only late last year, just a few months ago that the appeal was decided in New York City's favor. So this means that FEMA is redrawing its maps yet again. And as we approach the five year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy that's next week, these maps and the reauthorization of the entire national flood insurance program are still pending. And worsening climate change means the maps are likely to just keep changing again and again and again and probably sooner. We can't have another 30 year gap until the maps will need to change again, which is how much FEMA had kind of planned to update them in order to have enough data to work with. So here this shows again, if you can't see this from the New York City panel on climate change, it shows in purple FEMA's preliminary maps that have now been appealed and will be tinier. The light green is the estimates for what sea level rise will mean in the 2020s. Very soon, in 2050s, 2080s, the red is 2100. And these are very optimistic rejections of sea level rise that they're using here. So for Sandy affected homeowners in Staten Island, the whole process resulted in this state of limbo where people were waiting to find out as the maps were changing, whether or not they'd be eligible for a buyout or if they rebuilt, how high should they rebuild? How high would they have to elevate? And how long was it until the maps changed again and they had to elevate again? And these are really high stakes questions because elevating a home in New York City can cost up to $10,000 a foot. And FEMA's maps are saying you need to elevate maybe 14 feet, 16 feet up. So it's a huge expense. And that's the way you reduce these flood insurance rates that if you don't elevate, you probably can't afford to pay. So while flood maps such as FEMA's are intended, the thought is that they're supposed to reduce uncertainty. They convert it into measurable risk that you can do something with. In this case, they've simply served to redistribute that uncertainty. And they've shifted it onto individual homeowners who have very much struggled to recover from the storm, let alone plan for the future in this context. So as it turned out, only a fraction of those who organized in favor of retreat wound up being admitted to the state's buyout program. So for them, if they're able to get out of the flood zone for now, these maps are no longer kind of dictating their future and their possibilities. But this is a small number of people and they're people who will refer to themselves now as the lucky ones because they're able to buy themselves a few more years of security, financial security, security from flooding. And I should say that the proposal to use FEMA's maps as boundaries for the buyout was very, very short-lived. It incited a lot of resistance and it became really clear that it was not a purpose for which they could even be used. It didn't make any sense. So there were a lot of other complicated factors that fed into the selection of these neighborhoods. That's entirely, that would be many other talks. But the result was still kind of the same that just a small number of people became part. This is a cartoon that one of the buyout group leaders gave me. He was one of those lucky ones. He moved out of the flood zone to high ground. And he's not the only one who's trying to buy time in this context. The city, the state, and the federal government are also doing what they can to get a few more years. In recent months, the Army Corps of Engineers has developed another vision of the potential future coastline. And this is a seawall that would go in front of all of Staten Island's east shore, so the same area where residents were trying to retreat. And the wall would not be that much higher than Sandy's storm surge. And Sandy, of course, was not even a hurricane when it actually hit land. So there's a sense among some residents that the wall is perhaps obsolete before it's even been built. The wall's design takes historic rather than future rates of sea level rise into account. And I was at one meeting with a woman where she said, it's not history, it's fantasy. And everyone sort of nodded in agreement. So it's less a wall that's gonna offer definite protection from the environmental risk. But what it will do is it's geared to protecting from the financial risk posed by the flood maps to the city. So the maps will be amended yet again once the wall is built to take these places out of the flood zone. So I was trying to fit this in somewhere. I thought it was so interesting. It's from the city's climate ready Boston report again. And it shows in yellow, the 2016, this is the current shoreline of Boston and Cambridge. And then the white is where the shoreline was in 1630. You can see just how much of the city is built on fill, which people who live here probably already know. But it was more than I realized. So we live in a world that's been shaped by the maps of the past. And with the proliferation of risk mapping, it's increasingly shaped by the maps of the future. Battles over risk maps, over how to redraw the coastline after a disaster or an anticipation of climate change are struggles over time as well as space. So that's something I wanted to convey in this talk. It's about how to represent the past, how to envision the future and then how to navigate the present. And maybe all maps now in some sense are becoming more like risk maps because even those that kind of presume a stable landscape also hold the presumption that will act with sufficient urgency to preserve that landscape in some form that bears some kind of resemblance to how it exists in the present. And it may be kind of erroneous to call this talk Mapping Climate Change because the maps I've spent most of my time discussing do not take climate change into account, as I said. But it's these existing tools and the associated kinds of theories and systems, political systems, financial systems like insurance, prediction, technical systems, social systems that are serving to mediate a climate change to reality now for which they were not created. And this is true of media studies. You can say this about probably any discipline or anything that its kind of founding theories were created with the presumption of a stable climate that doesn't exist. So we have to rethink that. And for maps it begs the question, what kinds of new maps, new ways of mapping and new ways of using maps and seeing maps are needed to navigate this new reality? What kinds of stories will they tell and whose will they erase? And these are not new questions for anyone who's in media studies and studies maps, but they're questions that appear particularly urgent at the present moment. And they are the ones that I will leave you with today, probably. Thank you. You go first. No, you can go first. Thank you guys for sharing this with us. And in the face of the super nine-disabled ways that media studies can fail, stories will have to then come to it. I really appreciate that. Thank you. Super example, take one. Oh, right over here. I wanted to ask you about, like, even your research, do you encounter collectives or are you studying movements of people doing policy that are not making? I don't know, like, I remember the humanitarian of the street maps people, you know, I think Boston and New York, San Diego, I don't know, I think I managed to, like, stable any of the parts of the country. Yeah, that's a great question. It's funny, I think, Jane and I have talked about this before, but, you know, the area I wound up doing my research in as part of Staten Island, you know, most people I spoke to are older, they don't necessarily have cell phones. It's, you know, the kind of media I wound up writing about so much is, like, the print and newspaper and the fact that it was still print really, really mattered in terms of how people organized in this place. So beyond the sort of maps that I showed you that people were drawing and that hasn't come up so much, I think it's something that, probably when I'm, you know, working on revising this into something that is publishable and looking for other sources, a lot of them are talking about kind of crisis mapping, participatory forms of mapping, counter-mapping, but that wasn't something I saw so much in my own research. I have three questions, which is totally cheating, so, do what you can. The first one is, I was just curious if there's any discussion about buyouts in Florida, and the way it gets a recent hurricane there, I was struck by how many articles that were in newspapers right afterwards, saying, basically, yeah, why do anyone think you could live in Florida? This is, everyone knows that Florida's a very dangerous place to live in terms of climate issues, even without climate change issues coming to a head. So I was just wondering if you had anything to say about that. The second question was about Staten Island and the broader issue of the sort of politics of maps because you used to wear political a number of times, but not in the sense of like, well, conservatives or liberals or Republicans or Democrats or the ways we often discuss politics and the sort of directions in which things were charged. And so when I think of Staten Island, of course, a strong reputation in New York City is that this is absolutely the most conservative burrow, and everyone immediately snaps to like, God, 90% of the cops in New York City live in Staten Island and commute in and it's known for being a conservative community. So I'm just curious, as they're pushing for the government handout of a buyout, is there any sense of, well, we are speaking for working class Americans as a, you know, what are the sort of political balances of that? And are they, are there contradictions or are there actually people identifying as not being conservatives in Staten Island to a full length of this, these buyouts? The third and final question, which may be a non-starter is, I was just thinking about Robert Moses, the infamous New York City planner who much reviled by many New Yorkers. And wondering, I mean, he retired, I believe not long before the National Flood Insurance Act of 68, maybe in 65, four. And I'm curious if the buildup on Staten Island was a culmination of things that he had been working on for 20 or 30 years or more, or whether it was the kind of thing that he would have resisted for any reason, because he generally made choices that were very detrimental to working class people and very helpful to the wealthy. That was his system for building highways and bridges and so on. So I'm just curious if there's any backstory on Moses that plays into the thinking about development of sort of unsafe areas to which to develop. I'm sorry, that was. Oh, these are such wonderful questions. I feel like we'll have to continue with them. No, they're great. So the first question in terms of buyouts in Florida, and there have been, I mean, I think especially with Harvey in Texas, there have been a huge number, because there had been, I don't know if people saw that ProPublica article that had kind of foreshadowed the damage of Harvey and showed the development really dramatically. And that was just all over Twitter and it incited. I think Harvey was very much framed as a result. This is because the city had developed so much in its floodplain. And so there's been, and also because Harris County, that Houston's in had had a buyout program before Harvey. And now there has just been a surge of interest again in being part of that buyout program. So that's something I was surprised to find in a number of places when I was doing research on buyouts that actually it's rare that people who want them get them because the amount of money for them is very limited. It usually requires a disaster declaration. It requires a local match, which means that the city or town has to chip in 25% of the cost. And usually not only do they not either want to or have funds to do that. It means that they're losing some of their tax base. And so it tends to get blocked at that local level. Right now Houston is trying to scale up its buyout program. Last I saw they'd already gotten 3,000 calls from people who wanted to participate. But it raises really, really tough questions that I think in Florida are particularly vexing because so much of the development, I mean in places like Miami Beach is very, very luxury development. And that was an issue in parts of Staten Island too where there is a neighborhood, the neighborhood all the way at the southern tip of Staten Island, Tottenville, has a number of those small bungalows still but they're kind of mixed in with very big kind of waterfront McMansions. And I think from the perspective of people in government, the optics of buying out a place where it really looks like a bailout of wealthy homeowners on the coast, that's very, very tricky. On the opposite end, it's also tricky to buy out a very, very poor place because the state officials would talk about, they didn't want this to be seen as kind of a slum clearance program or something like that. So there's kind of tough optics involved in tough choices because even in Staten Island where it's a much more kind of working class place, people were getting in some cases several hundred thousand dollars for their house and there was some debate about whether the money should be used that way and there's a lot of rhetoric now about, well, didn't people just choose to live here? And ironically, as if this kind of goes into your second question, that's very much, you would think the attitude would be in these neighborhoods because they are very right-leaning, very libertarian. And so that was something that really surprised me that this would be the place that you'd find really in my mind because of the forefront of collective action to adapt to climate change that would be a place where the voters there overwhelmingly in this part of Staten Island voted for Trump. So one way that I think the contradiction was resolved for some people is this story of government culpability for past development. So the sense was, well, the government hadn't subsidized flood insurance in the first place, these properties wouldn't have been built. So they're just kind of making amends for a lot of previous government intervention and this is a way so that the government can stop intervening in people's lives and in the coastline once and for all. I think that would be kind of the way that it's framed in terms of kind of the politics of buyouts and the situation. And it's funny because, you know, Staten Island is actually, there's a great book about Staten Island called Conservative Bastion, in a liberal city. But that book is by political scientists at the College of Staten Island and they say actually Staten Island is probably the healthiest democracy in so far and it's basically evenly split in terms of political parties. It's just overwhelmingly conservative because the rest of New York, you know, never ever left the Republican basically. So Staten Island's very evenly divided in terms of voting. This part of Staten Island is more conservative. The North Shore is very, very democratic. But even in these neighborhoods, people held really wide ranging political views and so one issue when they were organizing because they knew to have a shot at getting bought out, they had to get everyone in the neighborhood to agree. And so that was why, you know, even if you privately are concerned about climate change, you probably won't frame a buyout that way when you're persuading your neighbor to go because it's something that could cause dissensus at a time when people were trying to not sow any kind of conflict. And in neighborhoods where people would sometimes say, you know, because I would ask people in other buyout programs, there are precursors for communities moving all together. And so I would say hypothetically, if that were an option, would you want to move somewhere along with your neighbors from a sociological perspective? And that seems very important.  But it was tricky, you know, because I think people really didn't want to bring party politics into it when they were organizing in this way. But that kind of that whole issue is something I'm trying to write about now because it's, you know, it's something that it's gonna take a lot of thinking through. And I, since the election, I've had so many people say, oh, you're doing one of those Trump voter projects. And I was like, well, I never thought of it like that before, but now, you know. And then that's kind of also connects to Robert Moses. So Robert Moses is the one who actually built that waterfront boulevard. That was responsible in some ways for a lot of the deaths. And part of the Verrazano Bridge and the plans that he had made for coming off it is the Staten Island Expressway. And that's what divides Staten Island's North Shore from the East and South Shores. And some people on Staten Island will call it Staten Island or New York City's Mason-Dixon line because it's seen as, you know, it's always been very, there's been a huge amounts of housing discrimination, including Trump-owned properties in Staten Island. You see the South and East Shores. The East Shore, bless so now with the South Shore, like, vastly majority white and the North Shore, high, you know, much more like the rest of New York City. And so that kind of divide reflect itself in kind of the movements that emerged after Sandy, too, for rebuilding and the conversations about rebuilding in the different parts of the island. I also love to talk. I've learned a ton and it's really interesting to me because I have a family in New York. And by the way, I would love to hear people talk about like, you know, every New Orleans or Harvey or whatever. But one thing that you didn't talk about, of course your research is focused on Staten Island, is Manhattan. You know, I mean, there was obviously major flooding in Manhattan. Manhattan is a fairly, you know, densely populated area and there's a lot of development.  You know, we saw pictures of full subway stations and it flooded us a lot. I just wanted to, you know, hear what, if anything, you learn in your research about things changing in Manhattan and how these things apply to, you know, the sea. And I also wanted to sort of, I guess, question the way in which you kind of phrase that the maps are pushing the burden on to individuals. And you use that specific kind of term.  And so it seems like, you know, it's not the map that's doing it.  And so similarly, you would think that, you know, just a priori naively that the map should tell you what your risk is, like in the worst case scenario, and including climate change and including, you know, in other words, the more of these areas that would, you know, be potential risk zones that could be mapped when you reason to be mapped would be better, rather than fewer. But then we live in a place, you know, and I don't want to bang on about it, but it seems like just when you're talking about development, this kind of laissez-faire capitalism messes things up, and then, of course, you have the shock doctrine, and then we climb after the thing happens, and then it backscrews everything up, and it's just like capitalism and individualized risk is such a huge part of what, you know, creates these problems. And I guess I want to know what you think some of the solutions are, and I mean, I personally believe in, you know, more distributed wealth and, you know, all that and socializing risk. Right, get rid of private property, I think. Right, I think you put that really, really well, and I think, yeah, exactly. So it's not, right, it's not the maps, it's, right, this whole system behind, I mean, it's the system that like makes the city want to appeal to them, it's the system that makes North Carolina ban looking at sea level rise projections when you're thinking about development, because there's this huge fear that you'll have disinvestment, you'll have this kind of collapse of the entire system of the economy as it's currently constructed rests on, and local government, I mean, you see, so in other boroughs in Brooklyn right now, there's this plan to build this waterfront transit line that's right in the flood zone, but in some way, the city, you know, is dependent to fund flood protection on getting more development. That's what's gonna fund the protection. So you're in this really kind of six, like all that it's hard to break out of keeping things as they stand. And there's definitely, I mean, just in terms of buyouts, there's some discussion of thinking about how do you change kind of local governments, dependence on property taxes, that seems like it kind of has to happen. But yeah, it would require really, you know, wholesale change, but right, it's not the maps. I mean, I had talked to a friend of mine, a colleague a few years ago about this, and he was saying, well, it's not even about the flood maps at all, it's about the data, it's about the insurance rates.  And that's true. And then I was thinking, well, why, you know, why do the maps seem so important here? And I guess part of it is, you know, their role kind of the opposite is their role in facilitating this collective resistance, because you have seen people across the country who are now identifying as kind of flood zone communities, organizing these kind of mass movements against, against the rates. And I would notice when I would go to meetings, people will never ask you like how much insurance, how much do you pay for insurance? That's sort of one of those money questions that people did not ask. But every time I sat down at a meeting, people would say, are you zone A or B? You know, what zone are you in? And then you have this kind of shared thing. So I think the maps are important in that way, creating that sense of a collective. Yeah, I agree with everything that you said. Manhattan, yeah, so I think, you know, the thing that you'll hear over and over again is like, well, no one's gonna retreat from Manhattan. No one's gonna retreat from, it just seems unimaginable because you can imagine picking up a house in Staten Island and moving in and even elevating it. But what do you do with kind of skyscrapers and the density of lower Manhattan? And I think, you know, in some sense, like a self-fulfilling prophecy because the places that are the most economic value are the ones that there's going to be investment in protecting the wealthiest areas. So, you know, you saw after Sandy, there were proposals to do kind of seawalls built under the Verrazano Bridge that would protect lower Manhattan, maybe, but would displace water and flood out parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island. That's happening, you know, the Louisiana Coastal Master Plan. There are certain areas that are included in protections, other areas that are left out of the protections that are these kind of sacrifice zones in a different way. But Manhattan has, I was involved in the Rebuild by Design competition. I don't know if you've heard about that. It was this federally funded and Rockefeller funded initiative after Sandy to design ways of rebuilding the region that could be kind of scaled and reproduced and it tried to take a sort of innovative approach where instead of having design teams kind of come in and propose things for a place they didn't know, they had to apply to be teams with kind of community groups and they couldn't have, they had to spend months doing kind of mini ethnographies in places where they wanted to work before they even came up with any idea for a project. So, trying to kind of flip the process. So, you know, with like, I mean, now there were some very interesting projects that were selected that in the implementation stage they can't necessarily build in the way people wanted them to be built. But the one that got the most funding is this kind of sea wall to go around lower Manhattan called the Big U. I don't think it's still called the Big U because only one portion of it got funded. So it's now called the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project. And it was a big deal that they picked that part of it to be built with the funding they had because you might expect that the kind of wealthier lower West side areas would be the ones that we protected first. But there was a real desire to protect the public housing that's there. All of the concern is for people who are living there and not in public housing without some kind of rent controls in place. Those people could get priced out through this kind of gentrifying effect that any kind of protection also can have. So that's another tricky situation but that's what's happening in Manhattan. I'm just curious, in addition to the buy-ups, do the homeowners have any capacity to take legal action against the developers who built these properties? Yeah, that's like a very live question. There's the Saban Center at Columbia's Law School. It's a Saban Center on Climate Change Law. I went to a talk there and I think these are things that are not resolved. So there were a few different cities in California that have just sued fossil fuel companies, I believe, and they want them to pay for the kinds of protections they'll need to adapt to climate change. One of the Alaska native villages, Kivalina, that voted many, many, you know, I think back in 92 to relocate because of coastal erosion and melting permafrost, they haven't been able to get funding to do that and they tried suing fossil fuel companies for the cost of the relocation. They weren't successful but I think there will be more lawsuits like that. And I think at the last talk I went to at Saban they were talking about how there had been a suit maybe in Chicago or in the Midwest where I think the city had been sued for permitting development that was in a known blood plane. So that's something that I think will be the next kind of big area to look at is how is the law gonna deal with these questions. You can imagine a lot of, I just thought I wanted to talk about it in legal terms, but I just want some liability. It's like negligence law, just give me this percent of the property and yeah, I think that's something I'm interested in following more as it develops. From a, I have a much better idea of what you do now. And it made me think about how, I guess for you as a being in sort of media studies, how often do you have to like, I don't know, revise your field to explain to people why you fit into that space because it can initially seem like you're coming at it more from an environmental space as opposed to really looking at sort of textual analysis with these maps and these graphs and it helped me to see all of them because I'm like, oh, I get it, maybe you said it, but I'm like, how has that experience been for you when you're sort of operating on like a, what I would think to be like a sort of fringe space within the apartment level or can you talk a little bit about that experience and what it was like transitioning from NYU and then what you've been, what your experience here has been so far along that same line that you just dropped. Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you said you could understand why I do media studies now because I have to say that I've given a lot of talks on my work, I've never given a lot of parts of this talk because I think only once ever for 15 minutes presented to a media studies audience. Those are not the kinds of invitations and audiences I get asked to speak to. So this was really, really daunting for me to think about, wow, it's so strange because I've come out of this media studies program and have trading kind of communication, cultural studies and so rarely do I ever, am I ever asked to frame my work in that way? So, and yeah, so it's something I'm still really kind of figuring out in my dissertation chair was a sociologist, he was not in media studies so that's kind of put me very much on the edges of these disciplines and I think the sorts of, the field is very much emerging now, the sort of field that you might say, the social life of climate change or however you wanna think about it, is still kind of being pieced together, so people working in environmental media, environmental humanities, kind of eco-media, that environmental anthropology, sociology of climate change, I'm speaking into a public health, at the public health conference in like a week and then to landscape architects at Harvard next week. So every time I give a talk I feel like I'm kind of trying to, in a way, figure out what I'm doing, I just see which audiences respond and how they kind of frame the work and it's definitely an issue for the job market. That yeah, hopefully all the wise faculty in the room can only work on over the course of the next couple of years. Yeah, it's tricky, I think it's, when you come to a, I did not come into my PhD program thinking I would write about this, I mean, Sandy hadn't happened, I didn't know anything about climate change, I didn't really think about the environment. I had worked on the role of visual culture and urban redevelopment and kind of public art and I displace my activism. And so yeah, I wound up doing a very different project which I think happens when you go into even a master's or a PhD. Anybody else? Just to start, this is another question to talk briefly about sort of the sort of political age going at one of the comments of sort of like trying to avoid the climate change discussion and then you said you're working with conservative communities, but we're doing a project right now in our workshop on climate change and so I was, they're doing readings all the time. And so I'm really curious what you think about the sort of climate change denier and specifically the argument there is that this is sort of repeated image I kept seeing of like charting all the way back to like 2000 BC and then trying to say like what we're experiencing of climate change now is just like a return to something. So I was wondering if in your work, one, if you have to deal with sort of that political aspect that your work kind of sort of throws you into whether you like it or not, then two, what do you think of that argument? Have you had any specific experiences where you've had to deal with that? Like either talking directly to people or just presenting your work? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the conversations or questions kind of about like climate deniers are kind of a red herring. I mean, I think there's a super well-funded industry manufacturing doubt about this topic, but even in places where that's not the case, there's a great book called Living in Denial written by a sociologist and ethnographer called Cari Norgaard. And she went to this village in Norway that has like the highest, they're off the charts in terms of individual knowledge and belief in climate change. Like everyone knows a ton about climate change. Everyone believes deeply in climate change and is really deeply freaked out about climate change. And she went and she lived in this village during a time when, you know, they couldn't have enough snow for their kind of ski-based economy to function. They were suffering kind of huge local impacts. And she realized that no one was talking about climate change and that actually it wasn't really any different than when she was in the U.S., even though people privately believed and were concerned and knew a lot about it, it was not seen as a public issue and it was not, and essentially it didn't matter in terms of their actions that people believed in it. People were not, you know, it was not seen as a local issue. This is, she writes about the local newspaper there and the role of that. People didn't see it as something to write letters to the editor about or organize school workouts about and, you know, why did it not become kind of the focus of local action the way maybe, you know, the Iraq War where you saw similarly kind of a distant issue that you could imagine on a local level, you don't control over, but that's the focus of a lot of activism.  But in some way, I think the denial is much more kind of systemic and in the New York case, I mean, you have Mayor Michael Bloomberg who's, you know, a huge advocate in terms of getting mitigation on the agenda and getting climate change on the agenda and really a leader in that. But then he's also really invested in waterfront development and kind of, I mean, you could argue that if you mitigate fast enough, maybe you can have, you can protect some of this waterfront development but you have different kinds of denial that are operating always. And I'm supposed to be on a panel about climate change denial at the anthropology meetings in a few weeks. So speak to me in a few weeks and I'll have like written down enough to know what I think more. But thanks for the question. All right, well, thank you very much. Thanks again. Thank you. Thanks so much.


Hello, my name is Sophia Pattai and welcome to another IOPB webcast. Today I'm joined by Dr. Hessem Razavi who undertook the MSc in Community IHealth in 2007, which is now known as Public Health for iCare. Welcome Hessem. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Sophia. So first of all, I would like to tell us, how did you come to know about the course? It was kind of happenstance and kind of destiny, I suppose. I was working as a clinical, as I've seen at SHO basically in the UK at the time, having come over from Australia. And as I approached the end of my one year clinical contract, I'd always been interested in public health. And I started mentioning to my bosses about these interests and our head of department at the time had gone through training with Claire Gilbert, clinical training with Claire Gilbert. And he said, look, I've got this friend in London, Claire Gilbert, she does that sort of stuff in the UK. I travelled to London one morning with Claire. That was it. So that's what got me started. So it was a done deal. It was pretty much a done deal. The instant I stepped in, I saw the photos on the walls and the stuff that Claire and I were talking about. And it felt, I felt at home. So that was a done deal. When you finally got to the school and started the masters, what did you do? What was it like going, you know, from being a doctor to being a student again? It was a pretty natural sort of fit for me. One of the first things I noticed was how high the standard of teaching was. It was just such a high quality of teaching. And I remember emailing my friends back home about that. Being a student again was fantastic. I mean, my classmates were great. People from all around the world, very diverse backgrounds. Everyone's in iCare, obviously, but they all had different things to contribute. And then the subject material is kind of exactly what I've been, what is missing, I suppose, in a lot of clinical practice, which is one patient at a time. So, yeah, it was easy to digest, if that makes sense. And now you've got the MSc under your belt. I mean, what's going on in your life now? And how has the MSc helped you to carry on with your future career plans? So after the MSc, I stayed on with the department for a year and a half. As a clinical research fellow and continued to do more of the sort of work that I'd done during the MSc. Subsequent to that, I went back to Australia to actually become an ophthalmologist. And I'm approaching the end now. My final exams are in five months. So I should really be studying right now rather than doing this. But that's OK, I'll make up for it. And so it's difficult to do too much of this stuff while you're training. I think once I'm done training in the next year, I hope to undertake a fellowship in a setting like India or South Africa or elsewhere in Asia where I can get my teeth into this sort of work again, to have the potential of blindness. Dr. Hesham Razavi, thank you very much. Good luck with your exams and good luck with your future plans in Korea. Thanks very much, thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you for joining us and join us again.


Thank you. Part of my job is to help webmasters create fast and secure websites. And actually, it's my very first work camp. And I'm really excited to be here. So, yeah, let's jump in. Today, we are going to look at two things. First, I'm going to talk about why website security is important and what common misconceptions exist about how and why websites are being attacked. And second, I will introduce six best practices that we think would help site owners to improve website security. And I hope we will still have time for Q&A. If there's one thing I would like to take away from this session, then it is this. Make website security priority by adopting the best practices. Let's start with an easy question. Why is making your site important? In order to answer it, let's look at some of the common misconceptions about how and why websites are being attacked. The first one is this. Security is not a developer's job. And you might think, as a developer, I'm interested in delighting users by creating a fast and reliable web experience. But what about applications or sites which are not secure and get compromised? Well, essentially, it will hurt your users and their trust. Therefore, as a developer, you should probably be thinking about security as well. The second misconception that we often encounter is how sites are actually being attacked. Site owners believe that their sites are being singled out and actively targeted by hackers, for example, sitting in a basement and guessing passwords. In reality, hackers try to exploit systemic vulnerabilities of CMS platforms, plugins, and third party applications. For example, outdated or unpatched versions. Important here is that it's not necessarily your business or even your site that becomes the target, but just a piece of software that runs on your site. The third one is related to the why sites are being attacked. Business owners think that, hey, if I don't store or process any personal data on my site, then it's very unlikely that my site gets targeted. Now, think of a site that belongs, for example, to an ice cream store, and it contains only basic information about ingredients or opening times or directions. However, it ranks really well on search, because it happens to be the most popular place in town. An attacker might be interested in exploiting this reputation of the site by monetizing the traffic to the site. So what can we conclude? Security should be an essential part of a great web experience. Second, a site is not necessarily the main target of an attack, and it's the technical signals rather than the business that matter. Think of it this way, a burglar works up and down the street and knocks on every door. And when the door opens, they try to understand what's inside the house. Before they enter the house, they don't even know if stuff that's in the house is valuable or not. In today's world, this work is done by computer programs, and your house might be the site. And if you don't lock it, you can see what happens if you don't lock it. In this example, I guess some of you heard of this case. It's a US-based company which manages personal data like tax IDs, emails, and other personal information for millions of US citizens. And ironically, it was hacked. And data of roughly 133 million users was exposed. Why do I show you this example? Well, it's even the best make mistakes.  Here's the example that we see every day. The Japanese keyword hack targets sites with good reputation on search. The way it works is that new pages are being created with auto-generated Japanese text in randomly generated directories. And these pages are being monetized using updated links to sell fake merchandise and other products in search. And with this type of hack, what you would notice as a side owner is that somebody would try to add himself as a property owner in Search Console. And if you see a notification in Search Console, then the probability is very high that you have been hacked. You might wonder how do I get hacked, how do I actually get access to Search Console out of the online accounts? For example, for phishing, if you're not familiar with phishing, what is it? Phishing is a form of social engineering that tries to trick users to use it. Let's look at an example. Do you notice something odd? I'm not sure if everyone in the room can actually see this slide very well. Sorry? The rest of the question is in the manual. Checkport, yes, that's it. One of the things that can help you to identify a phishing page is actually by checking out the URL. And if it matches the actual page, you can see the section by checking out the URL. And if it matches what you're usually used to. But there are more things that you can actually take into account as a user to understand if a site is a phishing site or not. Sometimes you would also have low quality images of the logos or the brand inside a phishing page. Or you can check out the target URLs if you hover over links on this page, if they actually bring you to another Google site or not. So in a nutshell, a phishing page will pretend to be legitimate and ask you for personal information. In general, all sites with a login page can be used as a phishing page or can be affected by phishing. Now you might think, who would actually fall for that nowadays? These are the numbers. So the most believable phishing site trick almost half of the users. And actually, when hackers strike, they move very fast. Accounts are accessed within 30 minutes after being phished. So it's really difficult to actually make up for the vulnerability after you have been actually hacked. So after all, what can you do? What can you do to protect your website better? We talked about how and why websites are being hacked. Now let's look at some of the best practices that we think might help you to build safer websites. We identified six. It's safer-looking, keep systems up-to-date, HTTPS, site verification, search console, backups, and training. Now important to note here is that website security should not be treated as a checklist, meaning that you just have a list of five to 10 points that you just check off and assume that your site is secure. But rather like building blocks that change or evolve or even disappear over time. Now why this is the case? Well, because the technology changes and evolves over time. Passwords are a good example. We will look into that in a minute. And by the way, so the backbone analogy is not intended, but it looks really cool. Yeah, let's start with the safer login. Strong passwords are essential to protect online accounts. What you see here is actually the opposite of strong passwords. These are among the top 20 most used passwords. And can you guess from which year? 2017. And does anyone recognize his or her own passwords? I hope not. My favorite one is this one. So for developers and site owners, you can find good advice on how to set up and make your authentication process more robust from NIST. NIST stands for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and is the leading organization that sets industry-wide standards on security and authentication. Here I would like to highlight two distinct recommendations from this. It's password limitations and password resets. You should think about three things when you create a login page or user accounts. The first one is you should forbid commonly used passwords, for example, that rely on dictionary words or sequential characters like we've seen in the previous slide. You should also avoid context-specific words. So if you're managing a WordPress site as an admin, you should avoid having WordPress in your password. You should also disallow password hints. And usually, password hints are based on some personal information. But in today's world with social media, you can guess or research many things that people actually use in knowledge-based questions, for example, what's your favorite car, or what's the name of your dog, or your birthplace, and so on and so on. And the last point is, yeah, you should limit the number of password attempts to prevent bots from actually running scripts and breaking, doing a brute force attack. The second recommendation is that password resets are not a must. The industry has discovered that every time you would, for example, force users to reset a password, the password strength would decrease. Why? Because with the increasing number of online accounts, it's really difficult to actually create and use unique passwords for each individual account. So users wouldn't necessarily tend to use shorter or simpler passwords to just be able to memorize them all. But even the best and strongest passwords are useless when they get phished. However, having strong passwords and following the most recent guidelines is actually not a bad thing. It's better than having a weak password or ignoring the most up-to-date advice. And this is where two-serverification comes in.  Has anyone heard or is using two-serverification already? Awesome, cool. If not, this is kind of a short description of it. So what two-SV does is it adds a second layer of authentication in addition to the password. And when it's enabled, the user starts the authentication process with the password, but it's then being asked to perform a second step. Now, how this second step could look like really depends on the preferences of the user. You can use SMS, you can use calls. There's an authenticator app provided by us, physical security keys, a second device, backup codes that probably most of you know from online banking in printed form, or verify devices. Let's look at the security key, for example. It offers the highest level of protection against phishing. The downsides are the cost. But you should think about potential cost or the impact of being hacked and cleaning up the hack, versus the price of those little things. If you don't want a physical device, oh yeah, by the way, so there's no wife I needed to use security keys. They technically work like a USB stick. And you can't combine it with mobile devices. And if you don't want a physical device, you can also use an application instead. The Google Authenticator app generates a random six digit number, and it works without an internet connection. It's easy to set up, and you can combine it with a lot of product and services that are not related to Google at all. It can be downloaded for free in the Play Store. So to summarize two certifications, it's an additional layer of verification and makes the authentication process more secure. It is effective against phishing. The best practice is enable it everywhere. So don't use it only for your Gmail account or, I don't know, for Amazon or Facebook account. If the platform you're using is offering it, just enable it. The second building block is updating your systems. Technically, it seems to be a trivial task, but in practice it's really hard to do. And I guess side owners, business owners, know exactly what I mean by developers, I think, as well. So what do we mean by systems? It's actually not limited to a CMS, but again, it's any type of software, plugins that target applications. Why is it so important to keep your systems up to date? Well, outdated software is like an off the shoelace. You might be able to walk, but it's just a matter of time until you trip and fall. The second thing is that we will usually tie or shoot before leaving the house. What I mean by that is that as a developer or a side owner, you should think early on about updates in the development process, meaning even before starting to design or develop an application or a site, you should already have the factor or the variable updates in mind. If you take a shortcut here, you can regret it in the future. This is an interesting graphing from Sukuri. I guess most of you will be familiar with Sukuri. You can see that at the point of attack or infection, most of the CMS systems were out of date, and Sukuri defines out of date by saying that the CMS platform was not on the latest security version or did not patch the CMS with available security updates when security was actually asked to engage and do the cleanup. It's worth noting, though, that WordPress did a tremendous job in decreasing this number from 2016. So in 2016, it was around 61%, and it dropped to 39%. What can you do as a developer or a side owner? Well, a lot, but focus on prevention. Cleaning up a hack is more time-consuming and painful than actually making a system secure in the first place. You can start by focusing on three things. Monitor website status, check server configuration, and pay attention to guidelines. Guidelines, like the one we offer under those URLs, you will find a lot of helpful resources under developers at Google.com slash web fundamental security, or support at Google.com webmasters. This is on the right. You can see an example from the recently published hack guides. Check it out under URLs. As we discussed earlier, a hacker would look for systemic vulnerabilities. If updates or patches are available, but you don't install them, they're kind of pointless. So the best way to keep up with the most recent updates is to enable automatic, to make them automatic. And a tip on the side, avoid applications that do not offer security options. When automatic updates are not available or broken, do it manually. This is an example where WordPress release 4.9.3 actually had an issue with other updates where the process actually didn't work. And if you are on 4.9.3 today, please upgrade to the most recent one. We just sent out a batch of notifications to WordPress webmasters through Search Console informing them about this. In summary, all systems should be patched and updated regularly. The best practices keep your code clean, if you do it already, fantastic. One of the things that I would like to highlight here is that if you stop using parts of the CMS or plugins or any other type of application, then remove them completely. Don't leave them on your server. The next building block is HTTPS. HTTPS is a mechanism that a lot of browsers have to securely connect to a website. HTTPS is the secure or encrypted version of HTTP. If you haven't implemented HTTPS or you need more talking points or convince your clients, think about HTTP versus HTTPS this way. HTTP would be like sending a postcard written in pencil. And information that you share on this postcard could be stolen, modified, and of course, read. Whereas HTTPS is like a sealed letter. It's hard to access and manipulate information. And if it gets compromised, then it's really hard to say a notice or to be a notice. From the user's perspective, things are going to change as well. From July 2018, Chrome will mark non-HTPS site as non-secure. And from September 2018, HTTPS will be treated as a default option. So there will be no label whatsoever for HTTPS sites. Why should you use HTTPS? Well, encryption, data integrity, and authentication. Data that is being shared online is encrypted, and it kept secure from these droppers. Data cannot be modified, as I mentioned earlier, or be injected with malicious software through the network without being detected. And it actually proves that your users communicate with the internet side. When you think about implementation, think about those four things. So first of all, ensure robo-security certificates. If you are running on a 1024-bit certificate right now, switch to the Stronger 1 2048 bit key. Use permanent redirects, like the 301 redirect, then help us, help Google to find your HTTPS pages. So don't block them in the robo-60 file. And please do not include a no-in-ext tax. If you're using a server that allows HTTPS, HTS, which stands for strict transport security, which means that if, for example, user types in the HTTP URL into a browser, this site will still come up in the HTTPS version. Or if you would look on Google Search for the HTTP version, we would still serve the HTTPS one. So enable it on your server. If your server doesn't offer this, then maybe look for a new one. HTTPS also enables new technologies, like geolocation. It's also improved performance, and you might actually see improvement in the search ranking. In summary, enable HTTPS on all sites. To best practice, well, there is just none. Just go for it. To do it, the next building block is site verification in Search Console. I assume most of you are familiar with Search Console? Yes. Who is not familiar with it? Awesome, cool. Search Console is a free and open tool that informs site owners about the status of the website. And it comes really handy when it comes to security, because it notifies you and informs you about the health of your site. On the left, you can see the navigation menu of the old Search Console, and on the right, you can see a snapshot of the new UI of the new Search Console. Before we get into why Search Console is so important, maybe some numbers. So in 2016, we discovered 32% of more hacked sites. And there are no indicators that this trend is actually going to change. 61% of all those webmasters who actually have the hack couldn't not be reached. But we know that once we actually notify webmaster of a security issue, then 84% of those are successfully cleaned up the hack. Meaning that communicating with a website awareness is really important in actually having an effective method of making the web more secure. And this is what exactly Search Console can offer. Under messages, manual actions, and security issues, webmaster will receive notifications and find relevant information about the site status. What we often see is that site owners that don't have a Search Console account, when they see this message in Search, they are simply overwhelmed and they don't know what to do or where to go. Site owners with a Search Console account would see this on the other side. So if a message appears in Search, that the site was hacked, this is what they see under the security issues section. We provide information about the type of issue or attack. We provide example URLs. And you also have a detailed description of the problem and how to clean it up, how to fix it. In summary, Search Console is a free and open tool that provides relevant information about the status of your site. And if you have multiple sites, then you can or should even verify all of those. That's the short one, have a backup. It's an important part of restoring your site and cleaning up the hack after it has been compromised. It helps to bring you up to the original content and the original state and the content of the site. It's kind of an insurance that helps you to not to lose users or users' trust. Again, it's a short one, very straightforward. It helps to restore and recover the content. And you should also think about an automated backup instead of a manual one. It saves time. And please be aware that once you use a backup, there might be still the vulnerability that was actually the reason for why your site was being compromised. So remove it as well or think about it. The elephant in the room, in a way, trainer employees, I know that probably as a developer, this point might not be that relevant. But if you work with clients, SMBs, that have a certain number of employees, then it's particularly important to actually be aware what can happen, what can go wrong if employees are not trained or are not aware of website security. Forced surveillance, offer regular and comprehensive trainings and resources, define clear rules and responsibilities for individual employees. And for example, how to install and use third party software, develop escalation processes. So if an incident occurs, then help your employees to report it and identify it. One of the things that we believe is also very effective, tool is actually educating your employees about browser warnings, like these ones. So while browsing the web, employees or in general users would see those, they should not be alarmed and trust them, instead of actually continuing the journey. The other thing is improve skills by following simple rules and principles. For example, as I mentioned, how to report suspicious behavior, how to do a backup, how to use social media, what to share or not to share, and how to handle sensitive data. In summary, you should encourage your employees to be part of the discussion about website security. What you should avoid is actually scaring them or blowing up risks or threats out of proportion. So we started with this question. Let's recap. What can you do to better protect your website? The first thing is, use two certifications to make your login safer. The second thing is, keep your systems up to date, no matter if it's a CMS, plugins, or any third party applications. Implement HTTPS everywhere, not only the login page but literally across the entire site. Verify the site and touch console in order to be able to receive notifications and instructions, explanations of when an attacker cures and how they can fix it. Have a backup in place just in case things go south and you will encounter an attack and need to fix it quickly. And the last one, train employees. Don't scare them. Help them to be part of the conversation. They're an essential part of your website security. If you want to learn more about it, again, these are three URLs that I would recommend. The first one is particularly interesting for developers. Second one contains all information that we provide to webmasters. And the third one is a platform that is being developed right now that helps you to learn and understand common attacks, like cross-site scripting, scale injection, and so on. Thank you very much.