Coastal Communities under Threat: Comparing Property and Social Exposure
Abstract
We examine the threat to coastal communities from sea level rise and extreme flooding. A distinction is drawn between the exposure of the physical property base of a community and its social composition. We investigate whether any correspondence exists between these two dimensions of vulnerability and whether it holds for both small and large communities. Flood scenarios along the Israeli coast are defined and we look at the resultant property and exposure patterns in communities at different flooding increments. Results are presented for three select inundation increments. Using comparative and graphic methods, we analyze exposure rankings for different communities and property and social exposure at the intra-urban level. We use break point analysis to trace the evolution of community exposure at different flooding increments. We conclude with some cautionary policy implications with respect to opportunities for change in highly exposed communities in the wake of extreme flooding.References
Bin, O., Kruse, J. B., & Landry, C. E. (2008) Flood hazards, insurance rates, and amenities: Evidence from the coastal housing market. The Journal of Risk and Insurance, 75 (1): 63–82. doi:10.2307/25145263
Bin, O. & Polasky, S. (2004) Effects of flood hazards on property values: Evidence before and after Hurricane Floyd. Land Economics, 80 (4): 490–500. doi:10.2307/3655805
Brooks, N., Adger, N. W. & Kelly, M. P. (2005) The determinants of vulnerability and adaptive capacity at the national level and the implications for adaptation. Global environmental change, 15(2): 151–163.
Brouwer, R., Akter, S., Brander, L., & Haque, E. (2007) Socioeconomic vulnerability and adaptation to environmental risk: A case study of climate change and flooding in Bangladesh. Risk Analysis, 27(2): 313–326.
Chakraborty, J., Tobin, G. A., & Montz, B. E. (2005) Population evacuation: Assessing spatial variability in geophysical risk and social vulnerability to natural hazards. Natural Hazards Review, 6(1): 23–33.
Church, J. A., & White, N. J. (2006) A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise. Geophysical Research Letters, 33: L01602. doi:10.1029/2005GL024826
Church, John A., & White, N. J. (2011) Sea-level rise from the late 19th to the early 21st century. Surveys in Geophysics, 32(4-5): 585–602.
Clark, G. E., Moser, S. C., Ratick, S. J., Dow, K., Meyer, W. B., Emani, S., … Schwarz, H. E. (1998) Assessing the vulnerability of coastal communities to extreme storms: The case of Revere, MA., USA. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 3(1): 59–82.
Cutter, S. L., Boruff, B. J., & Shirley, W. L. (2003) Social vulnerability to environmental hazards. Social Science Quarterly, 84(2): 242–261.
Fekete, A. (2009) Validation of a social vulnerability index in context to river-floods in Germany. Nat Hazards Earth Syst Sci, 9(2): 393–403.
Fotheringham, A. S., & Wong, D. W. (1991) The modifiable areal unit problem in multivariate statistical analysis. Environment and planning A, 23(7): 1025–1044.
Füssel, H. M., & Klein, R. J. T. (2006). Climate change vulnerability assessments: An evolution of conceptual thinking. Climatic Change, 75(3), 301–329. doi:10.1007/s10584-006-0329-3
Golik, A., & Rosen, D. S. (1999) Management of the Israeli coastal sand resources. Haifa: Israel Oceanographic & Limnological Research ltd.
Grinsted, A., Moore, J. C., & Jevrejeva, S. (2010). Reconstructing sea level from paleo and projected temperatures 200 to 2100 AD. Climate Dynamics, 34(4): 461–472.
Harrison, D. M., T. Smersh, G., & Schwartz, A. L. (2001) Environmental determinants of housing prices: The impact of flood zone status. Journal of Real Estate Research, 21(1): 3–20.
Jeverjeva, S., Moore, J. C., Grinsted, A., & Woodworth, P. L. (2008) Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago? Geophysical Research Letters, 35, doi:10.1029/2008GL033611.
Lichter, M., & Felsenstein, D. (2012) Assessing the costs of sea-level rise and extreme flooding at the local level: A GIS-based approach. Ocean & Coastal Management, 59: 47–62.
Martinich, J., Neumann, J., Ludwig, L., & Jantarasami, L. (2013) Risks of sea level rise to disadvantaged communities in the United States. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 18(2): 169–185.
McGranahan, G., Balk, D., & Anderson, B. (2007) The rising tide: Assessing the risks of climate change and human settlements in low elevation coastal zones. Environment and Urbanization, 19(1): 17–37.
Meehl, G. A., Stocker, T. F., Collins, W. D., Friedlingstein, P., Gaye, A. T., Gregory, G. M., and Zhao, Z. C. (2007) Global climate projections. In Solomon, S., Qin, D., Manning, M., Chen, Z., Marquis, M., Averyt, K. B. … Miller H. L. (Eds.), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Neumann, J. E., Hudgens, D. E., Herter, J., & Martinich, J. (2010) Assessing sea-level rise impacts: A GIS-based framework and application to coastal new jersey. Coastal Management, 38(4): 433–455. doi:10.1080/08920753.2010.496105
Neumann, J., Hudgens, D., Herter, J., & Martinich, J. (2011) The economics of adaptation along developed coastlines. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2(1): 89–98. doi:10.1002/wcc.90
Nicholls, R., Tol, R. S. J., & Vafeidis, A. T. (2008) Global estimates of the impact of a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet: An application of FUND. Climatic Change, 91(1-2): 171–191.
Olshansky, R. B., Hopkins, L. D., & Johnson, L. A. (2012) Disaster and recovery: Processes compressed in time. Natural Hazards Review, 13(3): 173-178.
Openshaw, S. (1984) The modifiable areal unit problem. In: Concepts and Techniques in Modern Geography. Monograph series, Vol. 38, London: Geo Books .
Peters, A. and Fisher, P. (2001) The Failures of Economic Development Incentives. Journal of the American Planning Association, 70 (1): 27-37.
Pfeffer, W. T., Harper, J. T., & O’Neel, S. (2008) Kinematic constraints on glacier contributions to 21st-century sea-level rise. Science, 321(5894): 1340–1343.
Rahmstorf, S. (2007) A semi-empirical approach to projecting future sea-level rise. Science, 315(5810): 368.
Rygel, L., O’Sullivan, D., & Yarnal, B. (2006) A method for constructing a social vulnerability index: An application to hurricane storm surges in a developed country. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 11(3): 741–764.
Vilibić, I., Šepić, J., & Gaxotte, Z. A. (2012) Coherent patterns in long-term sea-level variability trends derived from long-term tide gauge measurements. International Journal of Climatology. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.3449/full
Willis, J. K., & Church, J. A. (2012) Regional sea-level projection. Science, 336(6081): 550–551.
Wood, N. J., Burton, C. G., & Cutter, S. L. (2010) Community variations in social vulnerability to Cascadia-related tsunamis in the US Pacific Northwest. Natural Hazards, 52(2): 369–389.
Woodworth, P. L., & Blackman, D. L. (2004) Evidence for systematic changes in extreme high waters since the mid-1970s. Journal of Climate, 17(6): 1190–1197.
Woodworth, P. L., Menéndez, M., & Gehrels, W. R. (2011) Evidence for century-timescale acceleration in mean sea levels and for recent changes in extreme sea levels. Surveys in geophysics, 32(4-5):603–618.
- The contributor(s) (authors) warrant that the entire work is original and unpublished; it is submitted only to this Journal and all text, data, figures/tables or other illustrations included in this work are completely original and unpublished, and these have not been previously published or submitted elsewhere in any form or media whatsoever.
- The contributor(s) warrant that the work contains no unlawful or libelous statements and opinions and liable materials of any kind whatsoever, does not infringe on any copyrights, intellectual property rights, personal rights or rights of any kind of others, nor contains any plagiarized, fraudulent, improperly attributed materials, instructions, procedures, information or ideas that might cause any harm, damage, injury, losses or costs of any kind to person or property.
- The contributor(s) retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- The contributor(s) are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- The contributor(s) are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
- Geography Research Forum may disseminate the content of the publications and publications’ Meta data in text, image, or other print and electronic formats to providers of research databases (e.g. EBSCO, GeoBase, JSTOR) to facilitate publications' exposure.
