Incorporating evacuation potential into place vulnerability analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to illustrate a three-component operationalization of the Hazards-of-Place Model (HPM) by integrating urban infrastructure (using the capacity of road networks to facilitate evacuation as an example) to describe place vulnerability. This approach is informed by the HPM first articulated by Cutter (Vulnerability to environmental hazards. Prog Hum Geog. 20:529-39, 1996). The HPM is a conceptual framework through which place vulnerability is defined as a combination of social characteristics (expressed by selected socioeconomic demographics) and geophysical risk (expressed by probabilities of occurrence). Using a geographic information system (GIS), the study models the capacity of road networks to facilitate evacuation and used it as an example of urban infrastructure within which place vulnerability occurs. The output of the model was integrated with a geophysical risk layer and social vulnerability index layer as components for assessing the overall place vulnerability. The threecomponent approach to operationalizing the HPM provides a detailed and nuanced illustration of place-based vulnerability. As an applied tool, the threecomponent approach presents emergency planners with a new method of integrating diverse geographic data when illustrating spatial patterns of vulnerability to environmental hazards.

La medición de la vulnerabilidad en las dimensiones de la sostenibilidad. Apuntes desde la infrarrepresentación de las ciencias sociales

“…Esto puede contribuir a aumentar las disparidades sociales y afectar de manera desproporcionada a comunidades ya en situación de exclusión o vulnerabilidad. Además, la subestimación de la vulnerabilidad social puede llevar a respuestas ineficaces y estrategias mal dirigidas (Yorke, 2010), ya que no se abordan las necesidades reales de las comunidades afectadas. Esto, a su vez, podría aumentar la desigualdad social y socavar la capacidad de recuperación de las comunidades a largo plazo.…”

Modeling and mapping dynamic vulnerability to better assess WUI evacuation performance

“…These limitations become all the more apparent when mapped onto a geographic information system (GIS) platform, where the absence of the situational context (ie, the fire conditions without human response, or vice versa) deprives the user of key benchmarks by which to assess the severity of the situation (see Section ). Finally, numerous efforts have been made to produce results that can be spatially represented on GIS . This enables the outcomes produced to be located immediately, providing richer insights in conjunction with topographical information.…”

“…This enables the outcomes produced to be located immediately, providing richer insights in conjunction with topographical information. For instance, Yorke et al employed the H‐O‐P model to assess the vulnerability of different communities given the carrying capacity of the road network in response to a range of different incidents including hurricanes and storms, enabling static, relative vulnerability estimates of the populated areas given the occurrence of different incidents.…”

“…Other work has been performed to produce such integrated systems. However, these have typically focused on other types of incident (eg, hurricanes) or have not simulated the factors associated with WUI incidents …”