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.

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Many have voiced concern about the long-term survival of coastal communities in the face of increasingly intense storms and sea level rise. In this study we select indicators of key theoretical concepts from the social-ecological resilience literature, aggregate those indicators into a resilience-capacity index, and calculate an index score for each of the 52 coastal counties of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Building upon Cutter’s Social Vulnerability Index work [1], we use Factor Analysis to combine 43 variables measuring demographics, social capital, economic resources, local government actions, and environmental conditions within the counties. Then, we map the counties’ scores to show the spatial distribution of resilience capacities. The counties identified as having the highest resilience capacities include the suburban areas near New Orleans, Louisiana and Tampa, Florida, and the growing beach-tourist communities of Alabama and central Florida. Also, we examine whether those counties more active in oil and gas development and production, part of the region’s “energy coast”, have greater capacity for resilience than other counties in the region. Correlation analyses between the resilience-capacity index scores and two measures of oil and gas industry activity (total employment and number of business establishments within five industry categories) yielded no statistically significant associations. By aggregating a range of important contextual variables into a single index, the study demonstrates a useful approach for the more systematic examination and comparison of exposure, vulnerability and capacity for resilience among coastal communities.

The purpose of our research was to determine whether residential recycling programs introduced an additional benefit-reduced litter. We evaluated the proposition that such programs should impart to participants a heightened environmental awareness and understanding that may encourage them to litter less and/or pick up more accumulated litter. We examined accumulated litter by various types-recyclable litter, recyclable accessories, and nonrecyclable litter-in selected neighborhoods before and after the implementation of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, curbside recycling program. We found that recyclable lifter decreased significantly after the onset of the program. However, there was no similar decline in other types of litter. Although participants were motivated to discard fewer recyclables and/or pick up more recyclable litter after Implementation of the program, this behavior did not carry over to the proper disposal of nonrecyclable lifter.