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Abstract Losses from natural hazards are escalating dramatically, with more properties and critical infrastructure affected each year. Although the magnitude, intensity, and/or frequency of certain hazards has increased, development contributes to this unsustainable trend, as disasters emerge when natural disturbances meet vulnerable assets and populations. To diagnose development patterns leading to increased exposure in the conterminous United States (CONUS), we identified earthquake, flood, hurricane, tornado, and wildfire hazard hotspots, and overlaid them with land use information from the Historical Settlement Data Compilation data set. Our results show that 57% of structures (homes, schools, hospitals, office buildings, etc.) are located in hazard hotspots, which represent only a third of CONUS area, and ∼1.5 million buildings lie in hotspots for two or more hazards. These critical levels of exposure are the legacy of decades of sustained growth and point to our inability, lack of knowledge, or unwillingness to limit development in hazardous zones. Development in these areas is still growing more rapidly than the baseline rates for the nation, portending larger future losses even if the effects of climate change are not considered.
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Coupled Urban Change and Natural Hazard Consequence Model for Community Resilience Planning
Abstract This paper presents a new coupled urban change and hazard consequence model that considers population growth, a changing built environment, natural hazard mitigation planning, and future acute hazards. Urban change is simulated as an agent‐based land market with six agent types and six land use types. Agents compete for parcels with successful bids leading to changes in both urban land use—affecting where agents are located—and structural properties of buildings—affecting the building's ability to resist damage to natural hazards. IN‐CORE, an open‐source community resilience model, is used to compute damages to the built environment. The coupled model operates under constraints imposed by planning policies defined at the start of a simulation. The model is applied to Seaside, Oregon, a coastal community in the North American Pacific Northwest subject to seismic‐tsunami hazards emanating from the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Ten planning scenarios are considered including caps on the number of vacation homes, relocating community assets, limiting new development, and mandatory seismic retrofits. By applying this coupled model to the testbed community, we show that: (a) placing a cap on the number of vacation homes results in more visitors in damaged buildings, (b) that mandatory seismic retrofits do not reduce the number of people in damaged buildings when considering population growth, (c) polices diverge beyond year 10 in the model, indicating that many policies take time to realize their implications, and (d) the most effective policies were those that incorporated elements of both urban planning and enforced building codes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2103713
- PAR ID:
- 10387924
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Earth's Future
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 2328-4277
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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