Project 2: Coastal vulnerability: understanding interactions of the physical environment and social demographics

[kdorans]

Author: Author 1, Author 2, Author 3, ... Keywords: Community resilience, vulnerability, interaction of physical and social vulnerabilities, demographics, human well-being, environmental resilience

Project overview

Coastal populations are dependent in various ways on their natural, social, and economic environments. Gulf States make up the “working coast” of the United States, with large economic sectors in both oil and gas extraction, natural resource harvesting, and tourism. Communities on the Gulf coast depend on healthy coastal habitats not only for economic stability but also for social stability. As the physical environment (both natural and built) changes, demographics of coastal populations may change in response. Similarly, changes in coastal population demographics could lead to changes, positive or negative, in the physical environment. This project will aim to identify relationships between demographic changes and the physical environment and quantify the relationships between physical and demographic changes. A final goal of this project is to break down silos between biophysical scientists, natural resource managers, urban planners, and government officials charged with planning and development by showing the closely intertwined relationships between the natural and built environment.

Research Questions

(1) What are the relationships between changes in the physical environment and changes in the demographic environment across the Gulf Coast? (2) How do these relationships vary both temporally and spatially? (3) How do levels of social capital interact with the physical environment across states in the Gulf Coast?

Approach (at a high level) This project will examine correlations between measures of physical changes in the environment with changes in the social environment over both space and time. The physical environment along the Gulf Coast is an inherently coupled socio-ecological system, encompassing a range of built and ecological environments. On one end of this spectrum lies information on rates of relative sea-level rise, subsidence, flooding histories, and elevation. Also included in this spectrum lies data on land-use and land cover, information on flood protection features. Data on the social environment include information on demography, social capital and social vulnerability, and socio-economics. In order to look for relationships, we foresee at least X primary types of analyses, including 1) spatial correlation across the Gulf Coast at discrete time intervals (likely decade to correspond to census data; 2) time series analysis at distinct and representative points in space (i.e. Tampa, New Orleans, and Houston, Florida’s Big Bend, LaFourche/Terrebonne in Louisiana, Corpus Christi) and 3) a principal component analysis. Based on these analyses, and the shape of the relationships, we will make predictions for the next 50 years. Physical changes over the next 50 years will come from outputs of global climate models, and predictions of storms and sea-level rise.

Broader Impacts This study aims to assist state and local decision makers who are facing the increasing threat of climate change and and other disturbances . To accomplish this goal, this project will determine what relationships exist between changes in the physical environment and human demographic changes. Results should provide insight into which physical environment factors are driving demographic changes which ultimately drive community resilience along the Gulf coast over time. Outcomes from this project will contribute to decision support tools for federal, state, and local authorities when determining how to allocate resources such as public health infrastructure, public service infrastructure, civic infrastructure, community planning and development along the Gulf Coast.

Products

• Infographic displaying the interactions between social and physical environments in the Gulf Coast.
• Maps of the coast showing vulnerable physical points and vulnerable social points
• Time series analysis of changes in key representative areas such as Tampa, New Orleans, and Houston, Florida’s Big Bend, LaFourche/Terrebonne in Louisiana, Corpus Christi) cities in the Gulf Coast, such as Corpus Christi, Galveston, and Houston
• Demographic change at the community level (block group-

Might be a discussion for another day:: Do we need to consider a feedback loop between demographic change and change in the physical environment? (Example: Maybe when people start leaving, maintenance of structures to stop land loss starts to decline.)

Work Flow

• Identify available physical environmental data (natural and built)
• Identify demographic index that we will use and calculate indices for areas of interest
• Conduct PCA to determine principal environmental drivers of demographic change
• Conduct regression analyses using the identified primary environmental drivers to examine how they relate to demographic changes. https://marine.usgs.gov/coastalchangehazards/research/long-term-change.html

Project Outline I/ Physical Approach (1) Natural environment

• Relative Sea level rise
• Subsidence
• Flooding history (100yr, 50yr, 10yr)
• Extreme vs nuisance
• Groundwater salinization
• Surface water data (streams, environmental flows)

(2) Built environment

• Change of development land & non-development land (agricultural area, forest) in both rural and urban areas. (e.g. increase of geological risks)
• Residential Administration and public service (e.g. hospitals, schools)
• Commercial and business facilities (e.g. malls, shopping centers)
• Industrial
• Logistics and warehouse
• Ground transportation (e.g. road, airport)
• Municipal utilities (e.g. power station)
• Green space and square

II/ Social Approach (1) Demographic changes:

• Population (U.S. Census)
• Income
• Education
• Employment rates
• Housing number or % of Owner Occupied Housing Units (U.S. Census) number or % of Renter Occupied Housing Units (U.S. Census)
• Year Householder Moved In -- number or % Owner Households Moved In (ACS) 2010 or later 2000-2009 1990-1999 1980-1989 1970-1979 1969 or earlier -- number or % Renter Households Moved In (ACS) 2010 or later 2000-2009 1990-1999 1980-1989 1970-1979 1969 or earlier

(2) Community resilience (FAO 2011: these indicators are harder to come by, so we couldn’t do all, but we could do some):

• Income and food access -- Average per person daily income (local currency/person/day) -- Average per person daily expenditure (local currency /person/day) -- Household food insecurity access score -- Dietary diversity and food frequency score -- Dietary energy consumption (kcal/person/day)
• Access to basic services -- Physical access to health services (ordinal, 1 to 3) -- Quality score of health services -- Quality of educational system (ordinal, 1 to 6) -- Perception of security (ordinal, 1 to 4) --Mobility and transport constraints (ordinal, 1 to 3) --Water, electricity and phone networks (count)
• Social safety nets -- Amount of cash and in-kind assistance (local currency/ person/day) -- Quality evaluation of assistance (ordinal, 1 to 4) -- Job assistance (binary yes/no response) -- Frequency of assistance (number of times assistance was received in the last six months) -- Overall opinion of targeting (assistance targeted to the needy; to some who are not needy; or without distinction)
• Assets -- Housing (number of rooms owned) -- Durable index (Principal Component Analysis on list of items: TV, Car, etc...) -- Tropical Livestock Unit (TLU) equivalent to 250 KG; -- Land owned (in hectares)
• Adaptive Capacity -- Diversity of income sources (count, 0 to 6) -- Educational level (household average) -- Employment ratio (ratio, number of employed divided by household size) -- Available coping strategies (count, 0 to 18) -- Food consumption ratio (Share of food expenditure divided by total expenditure)
• Stability -- Number of household members that have lost their job (count) -- Income change (ordinal; increased, the same, decreased) -- Expenditure change (ordinal; increased, the same, decreased) -- Capacity to maintain stability in the future (ordinal, 1 to 5) -- Safety net dependency (share of transfers on the total income) -- Education system stability (ordinal; quality increased, the same, decreased)

(3) Social vulnerability (Cutter et al 2003) (Cutter 2013; Cutter 2016: to serve as a reference)

• Special Needs populations: difficult to identify (infirm, transient) let alone measure; invariably left out of recovery efforts; often invisible in communities
• Age (elderly and children): affect mobility out of harm’s way; need special care; more susceptible to harm
• Socioeconomic status (rich; poor): ability to absorb losses and recover (insurance, social safety nets), but more material goods to lose
• Race and ethnicity (non-white; non-Anglo): impose language and cultural barriers; affect access to post-disaster recovery funding; tend to occupy high hazard zones (AK: I’m really not sure how this works, particularly on the gulf coast, are the Vietnamese communities judged similarly to Cajun communities? Do we judge Cajun white communities the same as non-Cajun white?
• Gender (women): gender-specific employment, lower wages, care-giving role
• Housing type and tenure (mobile homes, renters)
• Social Capital Index -- Definition of social capital: social capital refers to connections among individuals -- social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them (Putnam 2000, 19) -- Broad indicators of social capital Voter turnout -- Social Capital Index (we don’t have to use this, but it’s something to consider; there’s peer-reviewed research referenced in the table that supports justification for each indicator - we can conduct a factor analysis to see which among them are the driving factors)
• Bonding Social Capital Educational equality Race/income equality Employment equality Racial income similarity Gender income similarity Language competency Communication capacity Non-elder population
• Bridging Social Capital Religious organizations Social embeddedness-religious ties Civic organizations Social embeddedness-charitable ties Social embeddedness-Church ties Social embeddedness- Fraternal ties Social embeddedness-Religious clubs Social embeddedness-Union ties
• Linking Social Capital Political linkage Local government linkage State government linkage Federal government linkage Political linkage-contribution Social linkage-social services Religious linkage-religious contribution Political linkage-political activities

[vdtobias]

Thanks for starting this, @kdorans!

[kdorans]

I was thinking of this as one example from the social/health project theme suggested by @mohammad. Please feel free to suggest any other ideas related to this, such as from the ones that @mohammad had suggested as social/health (29,26,21,20,17,16,14,9).

[vdtobias]

Edit: I copied this comment up to the top comment. Make any edits up top. :)

Here's a quick brainstorm of how these topics might come together into a proposal. Feel free to change, edit, scrap, etc. anything here. I didn't spend much time on the analytical approaches so those definitely need some additional thought.

Summary

• Communities on the Gulf Coast depend on coastal habitats for economic and social stability.
• Disturbances that impact coastal communities include acute events (hurricanes, oil spills) and chronic stressors (sea level rise, coastal land loss/erosion). Sea level rise is a slow moving disaster punctuated by stochastic events such as tropical storms, hurricanes and prolonged drought all of which impact coastal communities. • Communities and physical aspects of the coast interact. Research questions: • Can changes in physical resources predict demographic change in coastal communities? (#11, #17, #29) • How does the interaction of acute and chronic events impact environmental and economic resources on which coastal communities depend (#17, #29, #31)

Data needs

• Water levels (tides and river gauges; NOAA, USGS, Army Corps) • Land area change (USGS) • Demographic data (census?) • Land use and coastal habitat types • Oil production and/or oil spills (Louisiana DNR; NOAA) • Aquifer data

Analytical Approaches

• Map coastal communities that have been impacted by disturbances • Map physical vulnerabilities (through land loss) and coastal resources

Impact/Significance/Applications

• The findings of this research will give policy makers the information they need to determine which communities are vulnerable • This synthesis will help individual Gulf Coast communities evaluate the timing of the threat of sea level rise and its impact on the decisions of people to move inland. • This research will advance the Gulf Research Program’s goal of understanding how the human and environmental spheres interact in the Gulf of Mexico. • This analysis could be used to inform a decision support tool for developing coastal policies by forecasting how habitat availability and their related ecosystem services would change based on decisions • Consider the Louisiana Master Plan

[ascyoung]

Analytical Approaches: Map historic flood inundation areas Map groundwater salinity in coastal communities over time Map storm surge extents Map changes in land use Changes in community population vs time Employment changes vs time - maybe changes in major sector (i.e fishing vs oil rig, communities tend to swing back and forth depending on the oil market, but there are likely also natural forces at play) Archaeological setting- I know there is some data about native american middens for Plaquemines Parish, this could help inform how people have used the landscape over longer time scales. I will try to dig up this data.

[blombergbn]

Added some employment-related aspects, following ideas from #12. Sorry for the odd formatting - still figuring this out :)

[blombergbn]

Love the idea of a synthesis group focused on socio-economic aspects, and would be happy to participate in this group. Thanks for getting this started @kdorans ! I think a lot of the stuff proposed for the ES topic would fit here, as ecosystem services are inherently anthropocentric. By combining the social and ES topics, it would open up the potential for a different group to cover some of the proposals not yet identified in a group.

[blombergbn]

Thanks for the comments @ascyoung - I've added them above.

[vdtobias]

I think there is a lot of overlap between Project 1 and Project 2. I made a similar comment on Project 3 (#36) but I'll put it here, too. Maybe there is an opportunity to create some synergies by sharing common information (like data on disturbance), but making a more clear distinction between the two projects. Maybe Project 1 could focus on the ecological aspects of disturbance and restoration while Project 2 could focus on the social and economic aspects. Then the papers could complement each other.

[ascyoung]

I agree with @vdtobias. The way it stands now projects 1 #36 and project 2 are merging together. If we need to have 3 distinct projects then we should define the objectives of the projects differently to have two complementary papers. If project 2 focuses on social and economic aspects we could also incorporate more information from the energy sector (also suggested by @blombergbn), seafood industry trends and other changes in employment. Perhaps a decision making tool that focuses at on the economy and public health? There are a number of economic decision making tools in the Gulf, but they are either very local (i.e restricted to 1 town/city) or exclusive to 1 industry (i.e oyster farming). Overall projects 1 and 2 could work with a lot of the same base data for the physical and chemical system.

[kdorans]

I agree with @ascyoung's comment.

I added some notes about this above, but I think some recent work out of Water Institute and LA could provide relevant data + info to build off of for LA coast for both projects #35 and #36 . http://thewaterinstitute.org/files/pdfs/TWI%20NAS%20Coastal%20Infrastructure%202016-10-20%20-%20screen.pdf and http://coastal.la.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Attachment_C4-11.2.pdf

[kdorans]

This recent published NOAA report (Ecosystem Status Report Update for the Gulf of Mexico) might provide some helpful background and approach for thinking about projects #35 and #36 (and maybe also #37).

GoMEcosystemStatusReport2017_NMFS-SEFSC-706_FINAL.pdf

[vdtobias]

@kdorans That's awesome! I'm excited about this. I've been thinking about how these three projects tie together and I think what you just posted would be a good place to start thinking about that. It would be so cool if we could use the concept of socio-ecological integration to frame the three projects and how they work together.

[vdtobias]

Here's another exciting overlap or way to tie the projects together: Project 3 (#37) has also been discussing using data on fishing pressure (as a top-down control on fish distributions). Maybe this project could share data with that project.

[kdorans]

@vdtobias, that sounds like a great idea! @mbjones, I am flagging this, to bring to your attention @vdtobias' idea to use the concept of socio-ecological integration (from the NOAA report above) to frame/link the three synthesis projects.

(I should also note that I received this helpful NOAA file from a colleague, Buck Sutter)

[mbjones]

@kdorans Thanks for flagging this. I've been reading the conversation as it unfolds. The proposal by @vdtobias to use socio-ecological integration is a good one, and one that has served other groups well (we have several focusing on socio-ecological systems in Alaska now as well). Over the next 10 days, what is most useful is to try to get as coherent of a framing of the problem as possible, but we recognize that it will be hard to finalize this stuff electronically. So, there will be ample time during the first 2-3 day of OSS for the groups to finish the distillation process and get the group membership ironed out. This pre-meeting activity was designed to get the conversation started. I'll mention this in Slack too for those who aren't monitoring the github comments.

[blombergbn]

Some food for thought: http://grist.org/article/as-the-rich-move-away-from-disaster-zones-the-poor-are-left-behind/ Interesting study with data we may be able to use.
Boustan, L. P., Kahn, M. E., Rhode, P. W., & Yanguas, M. L. (2017). The Effect of Natural Disasters on Economic Activity in US Counties: A Century of Data (No. w23410). National Bureau of Economic Research.

[kdorans]

https://www.amazon.com/Louisiana-Coastal-Atlas-Resources-Demographics/dp/0807165883

[vdtobias]

Some physical coastal change data: https://marine.usgs.gov/coastalchangehazards/research/long-term-change.html

[vdtobias]

Data on storm tracks: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gis/

[kdorans]

Questions for Future Discussion (based on notes taken during 7.10 breakout. Please feel free to add others!):

1. Scope of project - dates, regions - considering feasibility/what could be done in 3 weeks + expanded out.
2. Was much discussion/differing opinions about incorporating disaster info into project - to discuss on Tuesday.

[kdorans]

Hi, @CourtneyPage, following up on our conversation, I wanted to pass on info about the work on social vulnerability index for the LA CPRA (recently highlighted on nola.com). (Also listed above!)