Regionalizing Resilience to Acute Meteorological Events: Comparison of Regions in the U.S.

Abstract

Using a Climate Resilience Screening Index (CRSI) that was developed to represent resilience to acute weather events at multiple scales for the United States, nine regions of the United States are compared for resilience for these types of natural hazards. The comparison examines the domains, indicators, and metrics of CRSI addressing environmental, economic, and societal aspects of resilience to acute climate events at county scales. The index was applied at the county scale and aggregated to represent select regions of the United States. Comparisons showed higher levels of resilience in the Northeast and West, including Alaska, (>4.0) while counties in the South Atlantic and South-Central regions exhibited lower resilience (<2.0) to acute climate events. Northeast, West and Mountain regions of the US are characterized by relatively low levels of risk (<0.26), higher levels of governance (>0.60), and above national median scores for society, built environment and natural environment domains which enhances their resilience scores. South Atlantic and South-Central regions of the US are characterized by higher risk scores (>0.31) accompanied by lower levels of governance (<0.48) and below national median scores for society and built environment domains reducing the region's overall resilience.

Enhancing Disaster Resilience by Reducing Stress-Associated Health Impacts

“…No one causes these disasters; they occur naturally and are arguably the most common. Examples include hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes, high winds, coastal, and inland flooding, landslides, earthquakes, temperature extremes (high and low), and naturally caused and climate-related wildfires (8), plus volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.(2) Technological disasters are acts of humans that result from malfunction of human-designed technology, human error, regulatory failure, and/or management shortcomings. These have a detectable cause and an identifiable party who can (theoretically at least) be held responsible for some of the damages caused by the disaster.…”

“…No one causes these disasters; they occur naturally and are arguably the most common. Examples include hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes, high winds, coastal, and inland flooding, landslides, earthquakes, temperature extremes (high and low), and naturally caused and climate-related wildfires (8), plus volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.…”

“…As occurrences, intensity and impacts of extreme natural and technological disasters continue to worsen, the need to increase disaster resilience among individuals, groups (e.g., families, work groups, civic organizations, churches), and especially communities, has become a common focus of scholarly papers about disasters (25, 26). While the concept of resiliency related to disasters has been around for a long time, definitions and interpretations of exactly what disaster resilience means are numerous, and there is no consensus as yet among disaster researchers (8, 25, 26). From a natural science point of view, the concept of resilience harks back at least to the work of Holling (27) on ecological resilience.…”

Linking coastal environmental and health observations for human wellbeing

“…Like vulnerability information, these data provide context and help identity factors that may predispose a given individual or group to certain health conditions, positive or negative. Relative indices of resilience to acute weather events at county and regional levels are also available ( 77 , 78 ). In addition to these secondary sources, community data also encompass local, traditional, and indigenous knowledge brought forth by community members about their environment, health, and interconnections between them.…”

Preparedness, Planning, and Advances in Operational Response

“…However, the human-focused domains of socioeconomics and human health are much more intertwined. Strong feedback loops cut across these human-focused domains, as human health is defined by both physical and mental health status, with each influencing the other (McEwen and Stellar, 1993;Seeman et al, 2001;Summers et al, 2018;Koliou et al, 2018;Ferguson et al, 2020;Sandifer et al, 2020). Societal factors influence mental health through general well-being that depends heavily upon income and employment, productivity, perceptions of harm, loss of housing stability, and loss of place and valued natural resources (Abramson et al, 2015;Sandifer, et al, 2017;Guo et al, 2018).…”