Build Back Better? Effects of Crisis on Climate Change Adaptation Through Solar Power in Japan and the United States

Abstract

Do communities struck by disaster build back better, or not? Recent small- and medium- N studies have shown mixed effects. This mixed-methods study tests the effect of disasters on the adoption of solar power as a key form of building back better and adapting to climate change. To test this effect, we applied a large- N longitudinal matching experiment on cities affected and unaffected by disaster paired with qualitative case studies, focusing on the 2011 triple disaster in Japan and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 in the United States. We find that disaster-hit cities adopt more solar farms and rooftop solar than cities unaffected by crisis and that the social capital of these disaster-hit communities shapes their adoption patterns. By clarifying the effects of disasters on the build-back-better phenomenon in comparative cases, this article aims to guide recovery priorities after large-scale shocks.

Do all roads lead to Sapporo? The role of linking and bridging ties in evacuation decisions

“…Thirty-three municipalities in Hokkaido reported homes damaged, 15 reported non-residential buildings damaged (Hokkaido Eastern Iburi Earthquake Disaster Verification Committee 2019), 39 reported water outages, from 1 day to up to 20 days (Cabinet Office 2018), and 66 municipalities were cut off from television service (Cabinet Office 2018), which closely overlaps with phone lines (Fire and Disaster Management Agency 2018). Finally, nearly all of Hokkaido was affected for weeks by power outages caused by loss of power from the Atsuma Coal Fired Power Plant (Fraser et al 2021b). Although regular service was restored quickly within 45 hours to most communities, Atsuma and Abira towns saw continued power service issues for days after (OCCTO 2018).…”

“…These municipal-level indicators demonstrated high internal and external validity in tests and correctly predicted known correlates including disaster outcomes from Tohoku communities after the 3/11 disaster (see Fraser 2021 for more information). These indices have been applied to study evacuation to location shelters , adaptation to climate change (Fraser et al 2021b), and community outcomes to the COVID-19 pandemic , among other disaster outcomes.…”

“…This technique was developed in the early 2000s , implemented in the Clarify package in Stata (Tomz et al 2001), implemented in R in the Zelig package (Imai et al 2008), and given improved functionality in 2017 . Simulation has been applied to hundreds of different social science studies, used to visualize models of political behavior (Klofstad et al 2013), diffusion of institutions (Bush 2011), and electoral outcomes (Panagopoulos 2021), as well as the topics of this study, disaster outcomes ) and evacuation outcomes (Fraser et al 2021b), among others.…”

The Road More Traveled: Evacuation Networks in the US and Japan

“…Finally, to represent social capital, I use new Social Capital Indices for Japanese municipalities from 2017 and new social capital indices for US county subdivisions from 2018 (Fraser, Page-Tan, et al, 2022), based on Kyne and Aldrich's (2020) Social Capital Indices for US counties. Third, the US and Japanese indices have demonstrated considerable external validity, consistently showing the same associations with key disaster outcomes as expected by literature, even in different national contexts (e.g., Fraser, 2021;Fraser, Cunningham, et al, 2021;Fraser, Page-Tan, et al, 2022;Kyne & Aldrich 2020). This analysis takes care to only examine indices relatively, using Z-scores to show how far a community is from the national mean, not in direct comparison, since these indices were compiled from analogous but slightly different data sources.…”

Social capital's impact on COVID-19 outcomes at local levels

“…Further, scholars and policymakers should use these indices to identify communities as similar as possible to their own in terms of social capital in order to make projections about their communities’ recovery trajectories. Finally, scholars should apply these indices to diagnosing and explaining a wide variety of other community resilience, highlighting the close relationships between social capital and policy-relevant social outcomes, including health 16 , political polarization 49 – 51 , 88 , 89 , adaptation to climate change 90 , and resilience to future disasters 25 , 55 , 91 . We hope that these indices galvanize social capital scholars to examine the role of social capital in their communities’ recovery and to encourage greater attention to the role of residents and community planning in recovery and response to crisis.…”