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Informing Decision-Making for Seaports to Promote Integrative Coastal Resilience
Citation:
Frank, J., K. Naney, L. Tran, T. Barzyk, AND Betsy Smith. Informing Decision-Making for Seaports to Promote Integrative Coastal Resilience. ASBPA 2018 National Coastal Conference, Galveston, TX, October 30 - November 02, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation at the 2018 National Coastal Conference, Galveston TX, Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018
Description:
Coastal hazards and the associated community exposure risks can develop when practitioners make decisions that optimize goals in isolation, without adequately considering cross-sector impacts, or without integrating stakeholder perspectives into the decision-making process. Due to the complex interactions between human, built and environmental systems, decision-makers are presented with unique challenges that require a systems perspective, multidisciplinary expertise, and multi-sector stakeholder collaboration to effectively prevent or reduce environmental hazards. The goal of our research was to identify strategies and engage multi-disciplinary experts in a systems analysis to evaluate how alternative decision scenarios for seaport management may interact across sectors and contribute to resiliency for the associated port community. A literature review identified systems thinking frameworks, and multi-sector maritime port variables in the following knowledge domains: port economy, coastal disaster and resiliency, energy use, hazardous materials storage and transport, and community health. Multidisciplinary expert engagement was used to refine the variable lists, create system maps, and to rank variables under multiple interacting sector goals to identify dominant factors that contribute to port community resiliency. This presentation will discuss systems thinking frameworks, best practices and strategies identified for systems mapping, and give an example of how expert-informed system maps can be integrated into decision analyses. We will focus specifically on a decision model called Analytic Network Process (ANP), which we propose provides flexibility to conduct integrative system analysis for coastal management projects to identify key factors that drive cross-sector changes in resilience under alternative decision scenarios when data or resources are limited, or for systems that are strongly driven by social or qualitative factors.
