Evolution of vulnerability of communities facing repeated hazards

Abstract

The decisions that individuals make when recovering from and adapting to repeated hazards affect a region’s vulnerability in future hazards. As such, community vulnerability is not a static property but rather a dynamic property dependent on behavioral responses to repeated hazards and damage. This paper is the first of its kind to build a framework that addresses the complex interactions between repeated hazards, regional damage, mitigation decisions, and community vulnerability. The framework enables researchers and regional planners to visualize and quantify how a community could evolve over time in response to repeated hazards under various behavioral scenarios. An illustrative example using parcel-level data from Anne Arundel County, Maryland—a county that experiences fairly frequent hurricanes—is presented to illustrate the methodology and to demonstrate how the interplay between individual choices and regional vulnerability is affected by the region’s hurricane experience.