Doctoral Dissertation Research: Development of a Spatially Explicit Resilience and Vulnerability Model Through Integration of Modeling and Stakeholder Perspectives

这一博士论文研究项目将加强现有的和开发新的脆弱性和复原力评估方法，以帮助利益攸关方提高沿海地区的复原力，将减轻灾害的目标锁定在被确定为最关键的地区。该项目将通过将政治经济学、政治生态学、社会理论和恢复力理论的理论观点纳入主要是应用科学领域来推进脆弱性和恢复力科学。该项目将对社会条件（如贫困）如何影响或使个人更容易或更不容易受到危险事件的影响或复原力提供新的理解。该项目还将设法确定进行脆弱性评估的最有效尺度，以便用于社区一级的减灾和规划。在本项目开展过程中产生的灾害暴露结果将被用作空间明确的复原力和脆弱性模型的输入，以衡量县以下一级的社区复原力和脆弱性。该模型的成果将分发给研究县内的社区，作为制定和实施社区可以切实实施的缓解和适应战略的资源，以促进有复原力的发展。虽然该项目将在佛罗里达州萨拉索塔县进行，但项目结果将在更广泛的沿海环境中发挥作用。在本项目实施过程中开发的理论框架、模型和方法将为社区提供更高分辨率的建模方法和产出，用于社区一级的灾害、脆弱性和复原力评估。该项目还具有确定缓解战略的潜力，通过制定和确定非结构性缓解政策来更具体地帮助边缘化人口，这些政策在历史上一直没有得到充分利用，尽管它们更直接地使脆弱性最高的社区的许多地区受益。这些适应性策略可以促进恢复，特别是在难以减轻危害的社区。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个强大的独立研究生涯。该项目将利用物理灾害模型与社会科学模型相结合的理论框架，改进现有的脆弱性和复原力科学方法。博士生将使用地球物理风险暴露模型和社会科学措施来估计社区脆弱性，并确定增强恢复力的潜力领域。她将开发测量高分辨率灾害程度的方法，这些方法将被纳入空间明确的复原力和脆弱性模型，以更好地确定灾害影响在社区内更有可能发生的地方。除了对影响不同地区灾害威胁的条件进行测量，并将其与她的数据结合到空间明确的恢复力和脆弱性模型中，学生还将参与与利益相关者的会议，以确定县外发生的外部指标，如联邦救济资金和州计划，以及影响整体脆弱性的风险感知指标。

This doctoral dissertation research project will enhance existing and develop new vulnerability and resilience assessment methods to assist stakeholders in increasing their resilience in coastal areas by targeting hazard mitigation to areas identified as most critical. The project will advance vulnerability and resilience science by incorporating theoretical perspectives from political economy, political ecology, social theory, and resilience theory into what has predominately been an applied science field. The project will provide new understanding regarding how social conditions, such as poverty, influence or predispose individuals to being more or less vulnerable or resilient to hazardous events. The project also will seek to identify the most effective scale for conducting vulnerability assessments for use in community-level hazard mitigation and planning. The hazard exposure outputs generated during the conduct of this project will be used as inputs in a spatially explicit resilience and vulnerability model to measure community resilience and vulnerability at the sub-county level. The results from this model will be distributed to communities within the study county as a resource for the development and implementation of mitigation and adaptation strategies that communities can feasibly implement to facilitate resilient development. Although the project will be conducted in Sarasota County, Florida, project results will have utility in a much broader range of coastal settings. The theoretical framework, models, and methods developed during the conduct of this project will provide communities with higher-resolution modeling methods and outputs for community-level hazard, vulnerability, and resilience assessment. This project also has the potential to identify mitigation strategies that more specifically assist the marginalized population through development and targeting of non-structural mitigation policies that historically have been underutilized even though they more directly benefit many areas of communities where vulnerability is highest. These adaptive strategies could facilitate recovery, especially in communities where hazard exposure is difficult to mitigate. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.This project will draw on a theoretical framework that integrates physical hazards models with social science models to improve existing vulnerability and resilience science methods. The doctoral student will use geophysical hazard exposure modeling and social science measures to estimate community vulnerability and to identify areas of potential for enhancing resilience. She will develop measures of the extent of higher-resolution hazards, which will be incorporated into the spatially explicit resilience and vulnerability model to better determine where hazards impacts are more likely to occur within a community. In addition to conducting measurements of conditions that affect the threat of hazards in different locales and their incorporation with her data into the spatially explicit resilience and vulnerability model, the student will engages in meetings with stakeholders to determine external indicators that occur outside of the county, such as federal relief funding and state programs, as well as risk-perception indicators that influence overall vulnerability.