A Fulbright Amazonia paper spearheaded by Stony Brook University Professor Liliana M. Dávalos has won a 2025 Editor’s Choice Award from the journal Environmental Research Letters.
The study, published in December 2025, won the Editor’s Choice Award in the Emerging Regions Category, and was one of four winners for the year. It reveals that thousands of disasters caused by weather had vast impacts on millions of people and vast infrastructure costs to the people of the Amazon.
The research team — including Dávalos, a co-corresponding author and professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Ecology and Evolution — focused on extreme weather and its human impacts in its research. The paper was, to the team’s knowledge, the first attempt to quantify weather-related disaster events reported by municipalities to central governments in Amazonian countries.
The team compiled and analyzed 11 years (2013-2023) of disaster reports from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, standardized into storms, floods, landslides, droughts and wildfires. They found 12,451 such weather-related disasters reported in Amazonian municipalities, hurting millions of people, with large impacts to public infrastructure such as roads, schools and health centers.
The winning articles were voted for by the Editorial Board of ERL as part of its annual awards program. Environmental Research Letters is dedicated to bringing together intellectual and professional scientists, economists, engineers, and social scientists, as well as the public sector, industry, and civil society, all of whom are engaged in efforts to understand the state of natural systems and, increasingly, the human footprint on the biosphere.
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