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Evolution of vulnerability of communities facing repeated hazards.

ABSTRACT: The decisions that individuals make when recovering from and adapting to repeated hazards affect a region's vulnerability in future hazards. As such, community vulnerability is not a static property but rather a dynamic property dependent on behavioral responses to repeated hazards and damage. This paper is the first of its kind to build a framework that addresses the complex interactions between repeated hazards, regional damage, mitigation decisions, and community vulnerability. The framework enables researchers and regional planners to visualize and quantify how a community could evolve over time in response to repeated hazards under various behavioral scenarios. An illustrative example using parcel-level data from Anne Arundel County, Maryland-a county that experiences fairly frequent hurricanes-is presented to illustrate the methodology and to demonstrate how the interplay between individual choices and regional vulnerability is affected by the region's hurricane experience.

SUBMITTER: Reilly AC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5617152 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Evolution of vulnerability of communities facing repeated hazards.

Reilly Allison C AC Guikema Seth D SD Zhu Laiyin L Igusa Takeru T

PloS one 20170927 9

The decisions that individuals make when recovering from and adapting to repeated hazards affect a region's vulnerability in future hazards. As such, community vulnerability is not a static property but rather a dynamic property dependent on behavioral responses to repeated hazards and damage. This paper is the first of its kind to build a framework that addresses the complex interactions between repeated hazards, regional damage, mitigation decisions, and community vulnerability. The framework ...[more]

PMID: 28953893

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Dataset Information

Evolution of vulnerability of communities facing repeated hazards.

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Evolution of vulnerability of communities facing repeated hazards.

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