Flood-Induced Displacement and Planned Relocation in Esparza, Puntarenas

For my Master’s thesis at UVA’s Frank Batten School, I set out to work directly with a public-sector client rather than write from the sidelines. That client was Costa Rica’s National Emergency Commission (CNE). After a series of meetings with senior officials at the CNE and the Municipality of Esparza, diagnosing disaster and risk-management gaps across the country, we converged on a problem worth a full consulting engagement: three communities in Esparza facing recurrent coastal flooding and river-overflow displacement, a problem sitting at the intersection of climate vulnerability, emergency housing policy, and local governance.

I applied a full-cycle policy analysis framework to build out four distinct relocation alternatives for these communities: a systematic literature review of international evidence on emergency housing and climate displacement, cost-benefit reasoning to evaluate the alternatives, and stakeholder-informed prioritization of implementation pathways. The client needed both analytical rigor and guidance it could act on immediately, so I kept every step of the analysis tied back to what the CNE and the municipality could realistically implement.

The result wasn’t just an academic exercise. It was built to inform how Costa Rica designs emergency-housing policy at the national level, feeding directly into ongoing conversations about social housing and climate adaptation. I delivered a complete technical report with a phased implementation plan, cost forecasts, a monitoring and evaluation system for tracking outcomes, and tools to adapt the alternatives to other at-risk communities. If you’d like to go deeper, the full report is linked on this page.