Study offers coastal communities better way to prepare for devastating storms

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.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161129114430.htm