Society for Risk Analysis (SRA)
Coastal storms can cause surges, sea-level rise, and cyclone
winds that devastate communities. But emergency management experts in a new
study detail a method for involving local stakeholders in planning for such
extreme events and thereby helping such vulnerable areas in becoming more
resilient
Coastal communities' ability to plan for, absorb, recover and
adapt from destructive hurricanes is becoming more urgent. As of 2010,
approximately 52 percent of the United States' population lived in vulnerable
coastal watershed counties, and that number is expected to grow. Globally,
almost half of the world's population lives along or near coastal areas.
"In general, risk management has not been sufficiently focused on coastal resilience, with community stakeholders involved in the process of making their coastline, as a system, more resilient to coastal storms," according to the study, "Enabling Stakeholder Involvement in Coastal Disaster Resilience Planning," by George Washington University researchers Thomas Bostick, Thomas Holzer, and Shahryar Sarkani.
Their study
was published in the online version of Risk Analysis, a publication of the
Society for Risk Analysis.
"This research demonstrates a methodology for involving
stakeholders in discussions that make their coastlines more resilient,"
says Bostick.
After disasters strike, local stakeholders are often surprised
and frustrated with the damages inflicted on their communities and seek greater
involvement in reducing risk.
That frustration can be addressed by investing more in physical
infrastructures to protect against flooding. But the needed infrastructure can
be expensive, such as the $14.5 billion the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was
given to reinforce New Orleans after the 2005 destruction caused by Hurricane
Katrina, an amount of federal support that most high risk areas are unlikely to
receive.
Recognizing that a methodology was missing for integrating
coastal stakeholders into the process of identifying and selecting of
resilience-enhancing projects, the authors conducted a case study with data
from a stakeholder meeting in Mobile Bay, Alabama, to demonstrate a method for
engaging stakeholders over a longer period to identify what the group
considered the community's most significant critical functions and project
initiatives to preserve those functions under different scenarios.
Mobile Bay, Alabama's only port for ocean-going ships and an
entry point for smaller recreational and commercial vessels, has seen
population growth and accompanying demand for housing, infrastructure
development, and other changes that have impacted natural ecological systems.
During tropical storms and hurricane events, Mobile Bay's Eastern Shore is
vulnerable to coastal erosion and sediment transfer into the bay.
A workshop involving approximately 30 participants was held in
2015 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Disaster Response
Center in Mobile, Alabama, to test methods to calculate resilience for the
Mobile Bay region. Participating stakeholders worked with subject matter
experts in systems engineering, coastal engineering, risk and decision
analysis, and other fields to develop a set of proposed projects to address key
resilience stages and domains.
Resilience domains include the physical (built infrastructure as
well as wetlands, dunes, and other natural features), information (policies,
building codes, evacuation routes, and other materials), cognitive (human
processes for sharing and acting upon knowledge to make, communicate, and
implement decisions), and social ("interactions, organizations, people,
and policies that influence how decisions are made," such as government
flood insurance, religions, cultures, and languages).
"Coastal communities can improve resilience not only in the
physical domain, but also in the information, cognitive and social
domains," says Bostick. The methodology described in the study is intended
to support such improvements.
Through the workshop, stakeholders generated 11 project
initiatives, including, for example, reducing saltwater intrusion,
environmental and coastal storm education, utility pole replacement, removing
scrap metal, and reducing impervious surfaces.
The subject matter experts aligned the initiatives with the four
critical stages associated with resilience: preparing, absorbing, recovering,
and adapting.
Participants also identified a set of critical functions, such
as telecommunication, electricity, housing, clean water, the tourism industry,
and others.
In reviewing the workshop results, the authors note that their
study does not seek to measure whether a community or a coastline is resilient
or not because there "is clearly no agreement on how this would be
accomplished."
However, the methodology offers stakeholders an opportunity to
understand the concept of resilience and scenarios and, based on this
understanding, to make informed choices on how to improve the coastal
resilience in their community. "This is a capability that does not
currently exist," the authors write.
