About

Fayola Jacobs is an assistant professor in the urban and regional planning area at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She completed her PhD in Urban and Regional Sciences at Texas A&M University in 2018 and earned her master’s degree in City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. Her graduate research focused on interrogating disaster mitigation plans and policies through a Black feminist lens. Prior to her appointment in August 2019, she was a postdoctoral associate with the CREATE Initiative. Her expertise includes environmental planning, climate change, gender, race and ethnicity, and urban and regional planning. Her professional background includes work at a mental health agency where she created and facilitated anti-oppression workshops on migration, racism, and mental health. Her scholarly contributions include research on urban disaster resilience and disaster planning from a Black feminist perspective.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Security
• Law
• Social psychology
• Criminology
• Gender studies
• Development economics
• Economic growth
• Psychology
• Economics
• Ecology
• Environmental ethics
• Geography
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Structural Barriers to Financing Just Adaptation in Majority World Cities

  Journal of city climate policy and economy · 2025-07-01 · 1 citations

  article

  This interview offers multiple vantage points on the challenges and barriers to climate adaptation faced by cities in the Global South. Experts from the Caribbean and the Pacific emphasize the need for a nuanced understanding of urban climate adaptation finance, drawing on examples from the Philippines and St. Kitts and Nevis to illustrate how physical and financial risks are deeply cojoined in climate-vulnerable cities. The discussion highlights the increasing reliance on blended finance and de-risking strategies to attract private capital, while questioning the effectiveness of these approaches in addressing the unique needs of diverse urban contexts. The discussion underscores the importance of recognizing historical and structural factors, such as colonial legacies, extant modalities of climate finance disbursement, and fiscal federalism, that shape the climate adaptation needs. The interview identifies key reform priorities to the international financial architecture, particularly concerning institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to alleviate the burdens of debt-bearing climate finance that disproportionately affect vulnerable communities. The conversation indicates that without addressing systemic macroeconomic issues, cities will continue to face escalating risks from climate change, ultimately jeopardizing their resilience and sustainability.

  PublisherDOI

• The world is not moving fast enough on climate change — social sciences can help explain why

  2024-03-10

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 20 : Social Systems and Justice. Fifth National Climate Assessment

  2023-01-01 · 9 citations

  report
  PublisherDOI

• Focus on i : Focus on Compound Events. Fifth National Climate Assessment

  2023-01-01 · 11 citations

  report
  PublisherDOI

• A Dangerous Debt-Climate Nexus

  NACLA Report on the Americas · 2023-07-03 · 4 citations

  article

  Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsKetaki ZodgekarKetaki Zodgekar is a Junior Research Fellow at the Climate and Community Project, Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University, and former Research Assistant at the Institute for Government (UK).Avery RainesAvery Raines is a Junior Research Fellow at the Climate and Community Project, seeking to incorporate a Black queer feminist lens into her work supporting organizing for climate justice and Black liberation.Fayola JacobsFayola Jacobs is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Minnesota. Her research takes a Black feminist approach to disaster mitigation planning in the Caribbean and U.S. South.Patrick BiggerPatrick Bigger is the Research Director at the Climate and Community Project. He has written extensively on the political economy of debt, climate, and biodiversity crises.

  PublisherDOI

• No Justice, No Resilience: Prison Abolition As Disaster Mitigation in an Era of Climate Change

  Environmental Justice · 2021 · 28 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Criminology

  Disasters are becoming more frequent and destructive while the consequences for incarcerated persons have grown increasingly visible. Simultaneously, scholars, individuals, and communities are grappling with police brutality and systemic anti-Black racism in the criminal legal system by engaging with the concept of abolition. In this article we demonstrate that these issues are not disconnected and argue that the abolition of the prison industrial complex (PIC) would mitigate the impacts of disasters for incarcerated persons and their communities. Incarceration undermines individual and collective resilience needed to recover from disasters, whereas carceral infrastructure facilitates disaster harm to incarcerated persons and their communities. Incarceration itself mirrors the harm and destruction of a disaster. Abolition of the PIC would not only prevent harm from incarceration, but also systems of accountability put in place by communities as suggested by abolitionists would contribute to the resilience of individuals and communities. By examining these connections, we provide a framework for considerations of abolition in an era of reckoning with anti-Blackness, the violence of the criminal legal system, and climate change, and suggest further investment of research in these areas.

  PublisherDOI

• Landscapes of Trust: An Investigation of Posthurricane Engagement and Recovery

  Environmental Justice · 2021-01-15 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  Background: This project interrogates how nonprofessionals are included or excluded in a professional-led disaster recovery process after Hurricane Michael along Florida's Gulf Coast. Disaster nonprofessionals, often volunteers, engaged in disaster work perceive their efforts as necessary to the recovery of impacted communities. Methods: Participant observation, semi-structured interview, and web response across three sites in the Florida Panhandle after Hurricane Michael generate insight into how different actors working in the same space perceive their work and develop or maintain fictions of institutional incongruences and barriers to coordination. Results: Findings identify vital processes that produce organizational incongruencies with grave and lasting implications for disaster-impacted geographies. These processes include volunteer intake, federal match funding, and exacerbated crises. Discussion: This tenuous dynamic, created by a lack of alignment of goals, exists primarily due to communication incongruencies, local history, and relationships built on professional forms of trust. Such trust, when tied to overwhelmingly white professions, can be racialized and classed, entailing potential environmental justice challenges. Narrative and organizational memory from past disasters drive feelings of trust and betrayal between these two groups working in the same context. Conclusion: This study reveals how disaster professionals and nonprofessionals perceive their work as part of or distinct from an accessible and unified government-managed disaster recovery process. Our findings demonstrate that the exclusion of certain populations from early recovery work has uneven, long-term implications for hurricane-impacted communities.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Social Vulnerability: COVID-19 as a Disaster of Racial Capitalism

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2020 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Criminology

  The hazards and disasters field routinely emphasizes that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. This is a nod to the fact that environmental disasters are caused by the human actions or inactions intersecting with the occurrence of a natural hazard, e.g. hurricane, fire, earthquake. This essay argues that the disaster literature can help us understand the causes and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic but only if we consider the pandemic as a disaster and its profound impacts as outcomes of racial capitalism. Through intersectional systemic forms of oppression that both devalue Black, Indigenous and Latinx people and extract labor from them, racial capitalism has rendered these communities vulnerable.

  PublisherDOI

• An Evaluation of Hazard Mitigation Plan Quality in the Caribbean

  Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2019-08-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Caribbean region is comprised of a number of small island states and low lying coastal countries that are susceptible to hurricanes, flooding, landslides, volcanoes and earthquakes. The region is especially vulnerable to the effects of these natural hazards as its small economies are mainly dependent on tourism and agriculture, both of which are frequently impacted by disasters. It is widely acknowledged that the region must create and implement forward-thinking hazard mitigation policies and plans to ensure the sustained development of the region and the safety of its people, economies and infrastructure (Collymore, 2011). The Caribbean Disaster and Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) lists hazard mitigation as one of its main priorities (Collymore, 2011). Many of CDEMA’s projects in the past decade, often funded through various international agencies, have provided regional level guidance on hazard mitigation planning and land use planning. Despite this, the degree to which CDEMA member countries have integrated hazard mitigation principles into their disaster management frameworks is highly variable (Disaster Risk Reduction Centre, University of the West Indies, 2011). Only five CDEMA member nations, Antigua & Barbuda, Belize, Grenada, St. Kitts & Nevis and St. Lucia, currently have hazard mitigation plans. Others have national disaster management plans that address hazard mitigation to some extent or hazard mitigation policies that provide frameworks for the creation of a hazard mitigation plan. This paper provides a brief overview of the importance of hazard mitigation planning as an important element of disaster management, discusses the history of hazard mitigation planning in the Caribbean, presents the results of a qualitative comparative analysis of the quality of the five CDEMA hazard mitigation plans and uses the results as a baseline from which to offer specific recommendations for the improvement of future plans.

  PublisherDOI

• Episode 23: New Directions for Disaster Planning Research

  University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy (University of Minnesota) · 2019-04-29

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Darien Alexander Williams

  Boston University

  6 shared

• Sloan Rucker

  University of Houston

  2 shared

• Benika Dixon

  Texas A&M Health Science Center

  2 shared

• Felicia A. Henry

  University of Delaware

  2 shared

• J. Carlee Purdum

  2 shared

• Richard Thomas

  University of the West of England

  2 shared

• Walter Gillis Peacock

  1 shared

• Himanshu Grover

  NYU Langone Health

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Humphrey School Welcomes Disaster Planning Scholar Fayola Ja…