Citation:

Smith, L., L. Harwell, Kevin Summers, J. Bousquin, K. Buck, J. Harvey, AND M. McLaughlin. Using Re-scaled Resilience Screening Index Results and Location Quotients for Socio-Ecological Characterizations in U.S. Coastal Regions. Frontiers in Environmental Science. Frontiers, Lausanne, Switzerland, 7:96, (2019). https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2019.00096

Impact/Purpose:

Increasing resilience to natural hazard events helps enhance and sustain community well-being over time. Nationally consistent measures of community resilience to natural hazards are needed to address widespread socio-ecological impacts from a broad policy perspective, while geographically specific resilience characterizations are needed to target local resources to increase community resilience. This paper focuses on rescaling the Climate Resilience Screening Index (CRSI) for U.S. coastal shoreline counties at the national and regional scales. The national coastal shoreline counties resilience characterization compares CRSI and the five domain scores across all U.S. coastal shoreline counties and describes the natural hazard profiles for each of eight coastal regions. The regional characterizations allow for comparison of resilience scores within region and are appropriate for looking at best practices transferability given similar multi-hazard profiles. When coupled with employment dependence on coastal resources as a potential additional vulnerability and human well-being quality of life measures, these regional characterizations and specific county level characterizations provide more holistic information that can be used by local planners to strengthen coastal shoreline county resilience assessments and potentially increase the likelihood of improving environmental, social and economic recovery outcomes.

Description:

In terms of natural hazard events, resilience characterizations provide a means of identifying risk profiles, degrees of preparedness, and the ability of communities to respond and recover. While nationally consistent measures of community resilience to natural hazards are needed to address widespread socio-ecological impacts from a broad policy perspective, geographically specific resilience characterizations are needed to target local resources to increase community resilience. The Climate Resilience index (CRSI) was developed to characterize the resilience of socio-ecological systems in the context of governance and risk to natural hazard events for all U.S. counties for the years 2000–2015. Those resilience characterizations were based on the full range of nationwide county domain scores. This paper presents a re-scaled application of CRSI, where county domain scores are limited to the range of scores within a specific set of U.S. coastal and shoreline counties within each of eight coastal regions. The re-scaled CRSI values for selected counties/parishes in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) region are also presented in conjunction with calculated Location Quotients (LQ) values >1.0, which represent a high employment dependence on ocean economy sectors. Using a combination of re-scaled CRSI and LQ values provides a more holistic picture of vulnerability and resilience in these U.S. coastal shoreline counties. The relative resilience assessments presented for coastal regions are useful in identifying potential strengths and weaknesses in resilience aspects given similar hazard profiles, a signature otherwise diluted in nation-wide county-level assessments. The unique approach of combining CRSI and LQ for characterizing natural hazard resilience described could be transferred to other specific geographies as defined by population groups, hazard profiles and economic dependence.

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