WWU’s Rebekah Paci-Green leads massive new report on school safety affecting 330 million children worldwide 

Climate change, natural hazards, and global conflict put strain on communities, especially their fragile education systems.

But schools are also great places to illustrate resilience.  

“You create a culture of safety out from the school, and it radiates into the community,” said Associate Professor and Chair of the Environmental Studies Department Rebekah Paci-Green, whose research interests include disaster risk reduction and comprehensive school safety.  

Paci-Green is the lead author of “Global Status of School Safety,” an exhaustive collection of surveys, reports and profiles published by Global Alliance for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience in the Education Sector (GADRRRES) that paints a picture of school safety policy around the world and helps provide a roadmap for improving conditions.   

Schools as neighborhood hubs  

Schools have been at the center of Paci-Green’s community resilience work for more than a decade.  

“Schools are the site of not only educating the next generation — which is the society you will become — but they can also be the site for disseminating and changing society in the process,” said Paci-Green.  

In 2015, just a few months after a devastating earthquake in Nepal, Paci-Green and her friend and colleague, Bishnu Pandey, an engineering instructor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, went to Nepal to assess the stability of school buildings that had been retrofitted versus those that had not.  

Out of that trip, Paci-Green and Pandey facilitated the development of guidelines and co-authored a publication that provides principles for how to build a school in a hazard-prone low- to middle-income country in a way that not only creates a safer school but builds resilience for the entire community in the process.  

By building with local materials, training local workers, and offering tours of the construction site, the students and parents get to watch their school being built and can learn about what makes it safe. And they become the watchdogs. 

“You make sure the kids are involved with a checklist. They’re asking ‘Have they attached hurricane straps? Can I see that they’re putting in the earthquake shear ties in the concrete columns?’” said Paci-Green. The immediate goal is schools that can protect students and staff even when local hazards strike.

But once a safer school is built, it also becomes a visual reminder to the entire community of what is possible and why it’s important.  

“When it’s all done, you paint the hurricane straps bright red and you have a sign that says, ‘This is a hurricane strap. It’s going to make sure that the roof doesn’t fall in on your kids in the next big windstorm’,” she said. “You leave documentation of safe construction in a community, that then influences how people think about and build their own houses.”  

A career in risk  

Paci-Green’s interest in disaster risk reduction, community resilience, and science communication stems from a pivotal moment in graduate school while studying engineering.  

She attended a presentation where she learned that the deaths of more than 17,000 people during the 1999 earthquake in Türkiye could have been avoided if buildings had been properly constructed. But the problem wasn’t Türkiye’s modern building codes; the codes addressed seismic hazards well.  

“If the engineering is solid but it’s not getting to society, then we’re not doing our job. We’re not taking it the last mile,” said Paci-Green. “And that last mile is kind of an important one because that’s where people’s lives are at stake. So, it’s not enough for a country to just have a good building code. That building code needs to be implemented.”  

A Fulbright scholarship to study the aftermath of the Turkish earthquake followed.  

“I wound up shifting my research from being an engineer to being the last mile between the engineer and society, which is all about making policy and community education,” she said. “I wasn’t looking for it, but it just sort of found me.”  

Years in the making  

The “Global Status of School Safety” was launched in June, but it goes back a decade or more. It initially came out of a groundswell of concern from parents, students, and activists around the world who were increasingly worried about earthquakes and other risks and hazards.  

Marla Petal, who recently retired from being an advisor for Save The Children, an organization focused on improving the lives of children worldwide, spoke with Paci-Green about what she saw as a growing need for comprehensive planning for resilience and safety from all hazards and risks confronting children at school.   

The United Nations (U.N.) had also begun shifting its focus from disaster relief to proactively investing in resilience. When they established the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction in 1999, one of their big focuses was safe schools.

“The U.N. started realizing that all the education sector development that they were putting in place and spending a ton of money on, it’s totally wiped out and is useless if it gets flooded or blown down or shaken into a pile of rubble,” said Paci-Green. “Development is only development if it lasts, it’s sustainable, and it’s resilient.”  

Paci-Green, Petal, Pandey, and others realized that what the U.N. and others were talking about weren’t separate problems but overlapping issues: construction, planning, education, and policy.  

So, they and others set to work on what would eventually become the “Comprehensive School Safety Framework,” a global consensus approach to addressing school safety that brought together the concerns of education, disaster management, governments, non-profits, communities and more. With a framework in hand, it became crucial to document where school safety policy stood globally. 

What followed was a robust survey of 46 countries, two island territories and nearly two dozen provinces in federated countries. In all, the results represent over 330 million school-aged children worldwide. The project was led by Save the Children and the Global Alliance for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience in the Education Sector, with support from the Prudence Foundation.  

But glossing over this work in a few sentences doesn’t do it justice. The survey involved pulling together the questions, translating them into 14 different languages, finding the right facilitator in each country or region to bring together the education and emergency management experts to answer the questions, and creating an online portal to accept, organize, and present all this information. The survey takes an all-hazards, all-risks approach, which considers everything from earthquakes and floods to violence and bullying to pandemics, pollution, chemical threats and more. And it ends with some individualized analysis and recommendations for improving resilience. 

They didn’t want the survey to be a dead-end one-way conversation.  

“We immediately gave each participating country a report that they could use for advocacy and self-assessment,” said Paci-Green. “We wanted it to be a catalyst for change.” 

That’s exactly what’s happening.  

A major policy assessment & next steps  

Now that the initial survey is closed, many of the countries and regions who participated are asking for more guidance. With the help of Paci-Green and some of her former students, the next step in the process is putting together regional workshops to walk through the findings and help countries figure out what to do next and to keep up momentum and desire for change.

Two of Paci-Green’s former students, Bianca Custer and Harriett Grantz, contributed to this work, alongside a host of external subject matter experts. Custer received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies with a justice and community resilience emphasis from WWU in 2024. Grantz received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies with a geography emphasis and minors in sociology and disaster risk reduction from WWU in June. 

The report was launched in June at the eighth Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in Geneva.  

“I suspect we’ll do another survey in about five years and look for improvements and change,” said Paci-Green. “But for now, we’re going to use the results as a leveraging tool for advocacy, for policymaker assessment and identification of areas of new policy or revision of policy, and as advocacy in the donor world. To say to donors, ‘Here’s where you could make a real difference.’”  

Interested in how Western students are learning about community resilience and disaster risk reduction? Read about degree offerings in the Environmental Studies department, including the Disaster Risk Reduction minor.  

Jennifer Nerad covers Western’s College of the Environment and College of Business and Economics for the Office of University Communications. Have a great story idea? Reach out to her at neradj@wwu.edu.