Growing up across six different countries, Allison Karabu learned early what it means to show up for others. “I don’t recall ever going to somebody’s house without bringing groceries,” Karabu, a student in the M.S. in Climate program at the Columbia Climate School, told State of the Planet. For her, lessons about community resilience began with her mom. “I watched my mom and the attitude she takes to life. She always believes there is a ‘better’ coming; even if you can’t see it now, it is coming soon.”
The same philosophy of care and presence shapes how Karabu approaches her climate work and studies. She is currently in her second semester of the two-year M.S. in Climate program. Karabu has always been drawn to interdisciplinary work, but her interest in climate resilience solidified during a summer internship in Kenya while she was an undergraduate.
She interned at the Aga Khan Foundation, doing a mix of office and fieldwork. Toward the end of the program, Karabu was sent to Mombasa on the coast of Kenya to work with local organizations on mangrove reforestation. “We walked through the marsh, and the soil was so dark it was almost gray. It swallowed my legs up to my knees; we all had to hold hands not to sink in. The local scientists explained that the dark soil was a result of carbon sequestration.”
Karabu’s team was GIS mapping the mangrove to track restoration efforts. Mangroves are salt-tolerant and thrive in intertidal zones. Their roots stabilize coastlines, buffer storm surges and store remarkable amounts of carbon: up to 10 times more than terrestrial forests. The mangroves, however, were not the most memorable part of this experience for Karabu. She worked alongside experienced local environmental scientists, many with multiple degrees, who struggled to find stable work in Kenya’s fragmented job market, where unemployment for PhD-holders continues to rise. “They were technically reporting to me—an undergraduate student. Something just didn’t feel right.”
That realization shaped Karabu’s path forward. “I don’t want to be in a space where valued communities don’t have access,” she explained. On an undergraduate class trip to Argentina, Karabu watched a community respond to the government’s plan to build a highway through community grounds. The residents turned the construction site into a social space. “I was expecting banners and confrontation, but it was a community outing,” she recalled. “People played soccer, cooked…that is a way forward, taking up space together.”
Karabu brought her focus on community to her studies at Columbia and into disaster preparedness work, where the questions of who gets protected and how are central. Through an internship with the Natural Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School, she has learned that the work of resilience must happen long before disaster strikes. “Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was so devastating because the infrastructure was already outdated,” she said. “When it was coupled with a major event, that made things so much worse.”
One case study that has stuck with Karabu was Japan after a massive earthquake in 2011. The country rebuilt its social relationship to disaster along with its physical infrastructure. School drills and a sustained cultural normalization of preparedness reframed questions of disaster in the country. The emphasis moved from whether disaster would come, to how to act when it strikes.
“How do you translate a problem into action?” Karabu asked. “It takes a long time, building relationships, consistent awareness, trust. It is very contextual.” She has come to believe that the most durable preparedness infrastructure is not necessarily found in a new federal program, but is often already there, just underfunded and overlooked.
In Kenya, Karabu met farming communities coordinating through WhatsApp groups that had been running for years to communicate which land is flood prone and who has resources to help out. “You can have the perfect forecast, and everybody gets a warning on their phone, but if people don’t act on it, it doesn’t matter. Does attending a workshop with 90 slides make you prepared for a disaster?”
For Karabu, the real driver of action is often community itself, echoing the ethos she was raised with. The knowledge that makes you prepared tends to be specific, local and built over time, according to Karabu. What outside organizations spend years trying to acquire, those communities already have. To her, investing in those networks is the foundation of resilience. How to best support communal networks, and from what position, are questions she’s still sitting with. “One of the hardest things I’m learning is to ask the right questions,” she said.
