Who is vulnerable and who is resilient to coastal flooding? Lessons from Hurricane Sandy in New York City
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Who is vulnerable and who is resilient to coastal flooding? Lessons from Hurricane Sandy in New York City Malgosia Madajewicz 1 Received: 8 January 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Social vulnerability and resilience indices identify populations who are at risk from hazards in order to guide policy to build resilience. This study investigates which of the indicators that commonly comprise the indices reflect vulnerability and resilience to coastal flooding in urban areas based on primary data that document the impacts of and recovery from Hurricane Sandy in New York City. The study constructs measures of vulnerability and resilience that are independent of proposed indicators and uses regression analysis to investigate which indicators influence these measures. The analysis finds that (1) middle- and low-income homeowners are less financially resilient than are poorer renters. The recovery cost middle- to low-income homeowners 2.4 times their annual per capita incomes, while renters paid out about half of their per capita incomes. Resilience increases with income but conditional on ownership of assets that are at risk. (2) Disabled and/or chronically ill residents are more vulnerable and less resilient by many outcome measures. (3) Non-white households experience longer disruptions of access to food. (4) Information, hazard-specific capacities of community groups, and pre-hazard access to services such as food and health care are important indicators of vulnerability and resilience. (5) The evidence that other commonly proposed indicators are correlated with independent measures of vulnerability and resilience to flooding is weak. The study yields hypotheses for further research on how relevant indicators differ across hazards and contexts. Keywords Social vulnerability . Resilience . Indicators . Extreme events . Hazards . Coastal flooding
* Malgosia Madajewicz [email protected]
1
Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025, USA
Climatic Change
1 Introduction Coastal flooding is one of the most costly extreme events in terms of both mortality and property damage, and climate change is intensifying the hazard (Frumhoff et al. 2007; Parker 2010; Rappaport 2014). Along the densely populated, urban, northeastern coast of the USA, current 100-year flood events will become approximately 30-year flood events by 2080 under central estimates of sea level rise (Horton et al. 2015; Orton et al. 2019). Hurricane Sandy was an unusual storm, but the record flood levels that devastated the greater New York City (NYC) area on October 29, 2012, will accompany more frequent storms as sea levels rise. The experience with the storm provides lessons for reducing vulnerability and improving resilience to coastal flooding (Rosenzweig and Solecki 2014). The literature proposes indicators that are hypothesized to reflect the social vulnerability and/or resilience of populations to hazards, and therefore are expected to identify populations who
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