Unsafe at any speed? The velocity of coastal risk along the U.S. Atlantic Coast
Abstract
Coastal risk can be expressed as a function of three components: natural hazard (sea-level rise, erosion, storminess); exposure (density of people or properties in a hazard zone); and vulnerability (susceptibility of people to be harmed, or property to be damaged, by a hazard event and the associated value of that damage). This expression may reflect the state of coastal risk, but not its behavior - and trajectories of coastal risk and its components are rarely mapped in time and space. With the addition of time-dependence, a simplified expression for coastal risk begins to describe a "wicked problem" - one involving inevitable trade-offs among complex component systems, natural and human, whose coupled dynamics are poorly understood. Here, we examine how coastal risk has changed over time in 51 coastal counties (from Essex, Massachusetts, to Miami-Dade, Florida) along >2500 km of the U.S. Atlantic Coast between 1961 and 2009. We estimate the components of coastal risk from empirical data at the county level data. Our results show approximately when and where the velocity of risk has changed, and which component of risk - hazard, exposure, or vulnerability, as we have represented them - is most responsible for each increase or decrease. By surveying large-scale patterns of coastal risk over time, we might gain dynamical insight into human-coastal systems that helps improve their management and resilience to disturbance under future environmental change.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMGC31G1332A
- Keywords:
-
- 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings);
- GENERAL OR MISCELLANEOUSDE: 0230 Impacts of climate change: human health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 4333 Disaster risk analysis and assessment;
- NATURAL HAZARDS