This doctoral dissertation research project will enhance existing and develop new vulnerability and resilience assessment methods to assist stakeholders in increasing their resilience in coastal areas by targeting hazard mitigation to areas identified as most critical. The project will advance vulnerability and resilience science by incorporating theoretical perspectives from political economy, political ecology, social theory, and resilience theory into what has predominately been an applied science field. The project will provide new understanding regarding how social conditions, such as poverty, influence or predispose individuals to being more or less vulnerable or resilient to hazardous events. The project also will seek to identify the most effective scale for conducting vulnerability assessments for use in community-level hazard mitigation and planning. The hazard exposure outputs generated during the conduct of this project will be used as inputs in a spatially explicit resilience and vulnerability model to measure community resilience and vulnerability at the sub-county level. The results from this model will be distributed to communities within the study county as a resource for the development and implementation of mitigation and adaptation strategies that communities can feasibly implement to facilitate resilient development. Although the project will be conducted in Sarasota County, Florida, project results will have utility in a much broader range of coastal settings. The theoretical framework, models, and methods developed during the conduct of this project will provide communities with higher-resolution modeling methods and outputs for community-level hazard, vulnerability, and resilience assessment. This project also has the potential to identify mitigation strategies that more specifically assist the marginalized population through development and targeting of non-structural mitigation policies that historically have been underutilized even though they more directly benefit many areas of communities where vulnerability is highest. These adaptive strategies could facilitate recovery, especially in communities where hazard exposure is difficult to mitigate. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
This project will draw on a theoretical framework that integrates physical hazards models with social science models to improve existing vulnerability and resilience science methods. The doctoral student will use geophysical hazard exposure modeling and social science measures to estimate community vulnerability and to identify areas of potential for enhancing resilience. She will develop measures of the extent of higher-resolution hazards, which will be incorporated into the spatially explicit resilience and vulnerability model to better determine where hazards impacts are more likely to occur within a community. In addition to conducting measurements of conditions that affect the threat of hazards in different locales and their incorporation with her data into the spatially explicit resilience and vulnerability model, the student will engages in meetings with stakeholders to determine external indicators that occur outside of the county, such as federal relief funding and state programs, as well as risk-perception indicators that influence overall vulnerability.
