Oct. 14, 2025 — Rural communities are often left out of disaster planning and recovery efforts, leaving them more vulnerable to long-term setbacks after hurricanes and other natural disasters. That was the message John Travis Marshall, professor at Georgia State University College of Law, shared during a recent University of Houston Law Center webinar titled “Farmland and Forestland in an Era of Climate Change.”
Marshall, who has done extensive research on disaster response and recovery from Hurricane Michael in 2018, said rural areas frequently lack the infrastructure, legal resources and financial safety nets needed to recover.
“We hear the same stories of not two- or three-year, but often four-, five-, even 10-year recoveries that communities have to navigate to get back to something close to normal,” said Marshall, who has a background in land use, real estate and litigation.
He contrasted the situation with cities such as Houston, New York and New Orleans, where preparation and recovery systems were in place for storms like Harvey, Sandy and Katrina.
When Hurricane Michael hit Georgia as a Category 3 storm more than 95 miles inland, the state was “completely unprepared,” Marshall said. The storm devastated crops just as farmers needed revenue to pay annual loans. With no disaster response program in place, Georgia lawmakers held a special session and approved $50 million in emergency funds, preventing widespread farm failures.
“Had the state of Georgia not acted and moved quickly, you would have had a widespread loss of farms in southwest Georgia,” Marshall said, emphasizing that a shortage of lawyers and resources remains a major barrier.
“It is almost impossible to get a local attorney on the phone who works in these issues,” he said. “There just aren’t enough lawyers doing this work and helping inform communities about how they can create a more vigorous, rigorous legal landscape that won’t fix all the problems in time of disaster but could make recovery less daunting.”
He added that some progress has been made.
With support from NOAA and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Chatham County officials are developing post-disaster recovery ordinances to strengthen legal and planning frameworks.
“We are working on a suite of post-disaster recovery ordinances or laws for Chatham County, the northernmost county along the Georgia coast,” Marshall said. “They’ve begun to think about what sort of legal infrastructure they might have in place that would help in some way advance their recovery, [they are] thinking about actual law, not just planning.”
The webinar was hosted by UHLC’s Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Center and moderated by Dr. Qaraman Hasan, a research scholar who also teaches at UHLC.
