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Development of a Multi-Hazard Landscape for Exposure and Risk Interpretation
Citation:
Buck, K., L. Harwell, L. Smith, S. Hafner, AND Kevin Summers. Development of a Multi-Hazard Landscape for Exposure and Risk Interpretation. Gulf Estuarine Research Society (GERS) Conference, Pensacola Beach, FL, November 03 - 05, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
This work summarizes the creation of a hazard exposure model for use in the Climate Resilience Screening Index (CRSI). The research will be presented along with a Gulf of Mexico specific example for the GERS conference.
Description:
A complete accounting of potential hazard exposures is critical in the development of any model meant to depict the resilience of a system. This allows for a clear ledger to both assess current risk status along with potential ways to improve resilience. The US EPA is currently developing a Climate Resilience Screening Index (CRSI) that aims to create a fuller accounting of community resilience (vulnerability and recoverability) to climate events. Of the five sub-indices that compose CRSI, risk represents the characteristics of a place that contribute to a community’s level of vulnerability resulting from specific hazards. As a construct within CRSI, risk is comprised of exposure and losses. While losses are relatively straightforward to measure, exposure is inherently more difficult to capture because of the varied nature of the hazards and geography. In order to more precisely measure the exposure element of risk, a spatially-explicit hazards model was created to calculate the potential geographic vulnerability to hazards by aggregated land types. CRSI uses a modeled overlay to represent a suite of natural and technological risks as a baseline exposure for a location. Land area calculations are made using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) in order to categorize risk types and hazard buffering. These calculations produce a land pattern from which exposure and risk estimates are derived as a percentage of land area potentially impacted by prior hazardous events. These estimates will be used to strengthen the representation of total vulnerability in CRSI. Due to its varied levels of development and unique habitats, a risk model for the Gulf Coast portion of CRSI is presented here to demonstrate the utility of this approach for characterizing risk in a diverse landscape under pressure from a changing climate.