Community resilience to coastal disasters

2014-08-06Coastal communities are some of the major economic centers in both the US and the world; yet, the dynamics of the coast make these areas prone to coastal hazards and disasters. Traditional responses to hazards have been retreat, accommodation and resistance. The coast itself has provided the first and more important protection for human communities, and for early coastal communities, the shoreline was the primary protection. As the shoreline moved, the community has responded by relocating, expanding and retreating, thus providing for community survival when the coastal features did not provide sufficient protection. ❧ Resilience addresses both efforts to minimize the extent of damage that results from a hazard event, and ways that the community responds to damages and restores community functions. Resilience is joining the more traditional approaches available to communities for reducing the consequences of hazard events, which include erosion, inundation, flooding and wave impacts. ❧ Shore protection features, including natural protection, engineered structures, and land use practices, provide community resilience during all phases of a disaster—the pre‐event phase, the event phase, the recovery phase, and the on‐going activities phase. However, no method has been developed to assess community resilience resulting from various protection options. This research provides lessons learned about shore protection, based upon investigations of several recent disasters. It also provides a synthesis of many of the protection features in use, covering how they function and the values they provide during all four phases of a disaster (pre‐disaster, disaster, recovery and on‐going activities), and the development of a Coastal Community Hazard Protection Index (CCHPR Index). ❧ The CCHPR Index provides a measure of the resilience of a community’s existing coastal protection and opportunities to compare the changes community resilience brought on by different modifications or additions to coastal protection systems. This research describes the development of this index. It starts with an analysis of the key services of a community and the interdependencies of these services. The key community services are characterized within these four disaster phases as are aspects of coastal hazard events. Coastal protection options are identified and evaluated for their effects on resilience throughout the four phases of a disaster, and these effects on resilience are used as inputs to the CCHPR Index. ❧ The CCHRP Index provides information on how each protective feature functions for disaster protection and the economic, environmental and social/cultural values that are provided. Vastly different features are included in the CCHPR Index, providing broad options for communities. The CCHPR Index provides a means to compare coastal protection elements across several important community aspects that rarely have intercomparable metrics—economical, environmental and social/cultural aspects. The CCHPR Index does not depend upon scale, nor does it require a detailed assessment of community vulnerability or evaluation of the condition of existing shore protection. The assignment of high, medium and low ratings to the economic, environmental and social/cultural benefits (or costs) of each type of protection provides a non‐monetary comparison of options and a means to assess the current protective options that are already in use by a community