Events Calendar

Astani CEE Oral Dissertation Defense

Speaker: Lesley Ewing, Astani CEE Ph.D. Student

Talk Title: Community Resilience to Coastal Disasters

Abstract:
Coastal communities are some of the major economic centers in both the US and the world, and coastal hazards make these areas prone to disasters. Resilience is joining the more traditional approaches available to communities for reducing the consequences of hazard events, which include erosion, inundation, flooding and wave impacts. Traditionally community resilience has covered both the extent to which a hazard event damages a community as well as the subsequent recovery; however, no method has been developed to assess community resilience resulting from various protection options.

The Coastal Community Hazard Protection Resilience Index (CCHPR Index) provides a measure of the resilience of a community’s existing coastal protection and opportunities to compare the changes community resilience brought on by different modifications or additions to coastal protection systems. This research describes the development of this index. It starts with an analysis of the key services of a community and the interdependencies of these services. The research then establishes four phases of a disaster – the pre-event phase, the event phase, the recovery phase, and the on-going activities phase. The key community services are characterized within these four disaster phases as are aspects of coastal hazard events. Lessons about coastal protection are discussed, based on field investigations of recent disasters. Coastal protection options are identified and evaluated for their effects on resilience throughout the four phases of a disaster, and these effects on resilience are used as inputs to the CCHPR Index.

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes