title: Measuring Community Resilience to Coastal Hazards along the Northern Gulf of Mexico.
abstract: The abundant research examining aspects of social-ecological resilience, vulnerability, and hazards and risk assessment has yielded insights into these concepts and suggested the importance of quantifying them. Quantifying resilience is complicated by several factors including the varying definitions of the term applied in the research, difficulties involved in selecting and aggregating indicators of resilience, and the lack of empirical validation for the indices derived. This paper applies a new model, called the resilience inference measurement (RIM) model, to quantify resilience to climate-related hazards for 52 U.S. counties along the northern Gulf of Mexico. The RIM model uses three elements (exposure, damage, and recovery indicators) to denote two relationships (vulnerability and adaptability), and employs both K-means clustering and discriminant analysis to derive the resilience rankings, thus enabling validation and inference. The results yielded a classification accuracy of 94.2% with 28 predictor variables. The approach is theoretically sound and can be applied to derive resilience indices for other study areas at different spatial and temporal scales.
authors: Professor, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State Univ., 1273 Energy, Coast, and Environment Building, Baton Rouge, LA 70803.
authors: Nina S N
authors: NS
authors: Lam
authors: Professor, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State Univ., 1273 Energy, Coast, and Environment Building, Baton Rouge, LA 70803.
authors: Margaret
authors: M
authors: Reams
authors: Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State Univ., 1273 Energy, Coast, and Environment Building, Baton Rouge, LA 70803.
authors: Kenan
authors: K
authors: Li
authors: Research Associate, LSU School of Public Health, 2020 Gravier St., New Orleans, LA 70112.
authors: Chi
authors: C
authors: Li
authors: M.S. Graduate, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State Univ., 1273 Energy, Coast, and Environment Building, Baton Rouge, LA 70803.
authors: Lillian P
authors: LP
authors: Mata
keywords: Adaptability; Coastal hazards; Coastal management; Community development; Disaster recovery; Resilience; Spatial analysis; Sustainability; Sustainable development; Vulnerability