Forgotten coast, forgotten people: sustainable development and disproportionate impacts from Hurricane Michael in Gulf County, Florida

Abstract

A central challenge for sustainable development is how societies are to avoid, minimize or address impacts from anthropogenic climate change. However, competing perspectives on “what should be sustained” lead to widely different understandings of what mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage entail and how best to approach them. We provide a novel conceptual and empirical comparison of two contrasting sustainable development-based approaches to the study of impacts from climate-related extreme events: Capital Theory and capability-based Human Development. We use our analysis of immediate residential property value and housing capacity impacts caused by Hurricane Michael in Gulf County, Florida, to demonstrate how the sustainable development theory used to assess and interpret impacts greatly affects the identification of whom and where is objectively “most impacted.” Through a comparison of the two approaches, we identify relative advantages and disadvantages, emphasizing that while both provide coherent, comprehensive, and integrative approaches to climate-related impact assessment, the capability approach is much less likely to lead researchers and practitioners to overlook the most disadvantaged communities when compared to Capital Theory.

Urban Movements and Climate Change

“…The economic choice approach to environmental policy evaluation, i.e., capital theory, has well-known and major limitations. These shortcomings are both general (Boda et al, 2021(Boda et al, , 2022b and specific to coastal management in Florida (Boda, 2018b(Boda, , 2018c, and include the propensity to exclude noneconomic concerns, producing inaccurate social valuations of nonmarket goods and services and neglecting the issue of the distribution of costs and benefits within society (Boda, 2018c).…”

Sustainable Development and Canada’s Transitioning Energy Systems

“…None of the SD strategies are necessarily better or worse, but they do have their respective advantages and disadvantages in different contexts. For example, economic choice has the advantage of being easily operationalized within existing societal structures, and social choice has the advantage of considering the needs of disadvantaged individuals and communities [30]. The selection of SD strategies influences whether an energy transition will occur quickly or slowly [31].…”