Mapping and assessing coastal resilience in the Caribbean region

Abstract

Assessing the vulnerability and resilience to coastal hazards is a critical worldwide issue, especially for hurricane-prone coastal regions such as the Caribbean. However, the development of a useful metric for vulnerability and resilience assessment has a lot of challenges. Cartography and GIS analysis can contribute effectively to the solution of the issue by integrating natural and human data layers for assessment, mapping, and visualization. This paper uses the new Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) model to assess the resilience of 25 countries in the Caribbean region to hurricanes. The RIM indices of the countries were computed using three variables representing three dimensions: exposure, damage, and recovery, and eight variables representing social-environmental capacity. The RIM resilience indices were mapped and compared with the vulnerability indices computed in a previous study. The results show that Turks & Caicos Islands had the highest resilience, whereas Montserrat had the lowest. This paper contributes to the hazard literature by demonstrating new vulnerability and resilience assessment methodologies that include validation and enable inference. The paper also contributes to the cartography and GIS literature by demonstrating the need to integrate data and perspectives from multiple disciplines and regions, as well as the ability of geospatial technology, in producing useful decision-making tools for a very pressing societal problem.

Climate vulnerability mapping: A systematic review and future prospects

“…The United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) Research on Climate Change Vulnerability, Impacts and Adaptation (PROVIA), a comprehensive effort to assess the state of vulnerability assessment for adaptation planning, states explicitly that measuring and mapping vulnerability is a top research priority (PROVIA, ). Maps have been used to identify areas of social vulnerability to climate hazards such as flood, drought, and sea level rise (Islam et al, ; Lam, Qiang, Arenas, Brito, & Liu, ; Notenbaert, Massawe, & Herrero, ) and health impacts such as malaria (Hagenlocher & Castro, ), dengue (Dickin, Schuster‐Wallace, & Elliott, ), extreme heat (Reid et al, ; Weber, Sadoff, Zell, & de Sherbinin, ), and food insecurity (Kok et al, ; Thornton et al, ; van Wesenbeeck, Sonneveld, & Voortman, ) (Figure ). End users have found the information contained in vulnerability maps useful for planning adaptation assistance (de Sherbinin, Apotsos, & Chevrier, ), understanding the underlying factors contributing to vulnerability (Preston, Brooke, Measham, Smith, & Gorddard, ), emergency response and disaster planning (Blaikie, Cannon, Davis, & Wisner, ), risk communication and informing risk‐reduction decision‐making (Edwards, Gustafsson, & Naslund‐Landenmark, ; Patt, Klein, & de la Vega‐Leinert, ), and land use management (UNDP, ).…”

Assessing Community Resilience to Coastal Hazards in the Lower Mississippi River Basin

“…The method was first applied to quantify resilience to climate-related hazards for 52 counties along the northern Gulf of Mexico and yielded high classification accuracy (94.2%). The method has since been applied to evaluate the resilience of the Caribbean countries to coastal hazards and earthquake resilience in China [8,33].…”

“…Water 2016, 8,46 3 of 18 indices generally include five important domains (social, economic, institutional, infrastructural and natural) and there is a need to use appropriate and effective methods to quantify their relative contribution to resilience. However, validation of a resilience index with external reference data has posed a persistent challenge [28].…”

“…These hazardous events have negatively impacted the communities in various degrees. The uneven responses and recovery behaviors of the communities may be due to their spatial variation of exposure to natural hazards, damage sustained, and social and environmental capacity [3][4][5][6][7][8]. Therefore, identifying the places that are resilient to disasters and understanding the underlying indicators are critical for pre-disaster preparation, post-disaster recovery, and establishment of mitigation plans.…”

Constructing stability landscapes to identify alternative states in coupled social-ecological agent-based models

“…Past hazard exposure and response (Cutter et al 2010, Lam et al 2015, and shifts in the variance of system properties are possible a priori indicators of state transitions and resilience Brock 2006, Scheffer et al 2009). Additionally, the scale and spatial structure of the SES and of the network of connected systems Dynamic models that integrate human behavior pose further challenges, as the heterogeneity in individual human experiences, interactions, and context is key to understanding macrolevel patterns and outcomes.…”