Search for: All records

In the context of climate change, the term resilience was popularized by the field of ecology to describe how ecological systems respond to stress and has since been adopted and significantly adapted by various fields, including psychology, policy, urban planning, and engineering. The exact meaning of resilience has blurred over time. In the context of coastal hazards, “resilience” is a holistic idea that relates long and short-term physical hazards with societal and biological impacts and mitigation measures. However, applying this idea to community-based mitigation planning remains challenging due to: (1) the diverse meanings, perspectives, and applications of the term, (2) the tendency of the term to defer to the status quo, thereby neglecting the voices of historically marginalized populations, and (3) the non-participatory and quantitative nature of resilience studies, often depending on cost-benefit analyses. In this paper, an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners develops and proposes a new conceptual model for coastal resilience that offers to help address these aforementioned challenges by focusing on meaningful community engagement. The goal of this paper is to introduce the pitfalls of existing interpretations of coastal resilience, describe the team-based approach applied to develop this framework, and provide a theoretical path forward that addresses the current challenges in describing coastal resilience. This new framework (a) integrates relevant factors of coastal resilience including hazards, exposure, vulnerability, adaptation, mitigation and preparedness to qualitatively explore a community’s perception and state of resilience which (b) transcends existing models and (c) can be interpreted through a variety of perspectives. This model can be applied to document and assess locally differential understandings of coastal resilience and to engage communities in reflections of their individual and collective sense of resilience. 

As the third hurricane the U.S. experienced in 2017, Hurricane María generated impacts that resulted in both short term and long term suffering in Puerto Rico. In this study, we aim to quantify the vulnerability of Puerto Ricans by taking region and society specific characteristics of the island into account. To do this, we follow Cutter et al.’s social vulnerability calculation, which is an inductive approach that aims to represent a society based on its characteristics. We adapted the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) for Puerto Rico by using data obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau. We analyzed the newly calculated SoVI for Puerto Rico and compared it with the existing deductive approach developed by the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Our findings show that the new index is able to capture some characteristics that the existing vulnerability index is unable to do.