Citation

Reilly AC, Guikema SD, Zhu L, Igusa T. PLoS One 2017; 12(9): e0182719.

Affiliation

Department of Civil Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Public Library of Science)

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0182719

PMID

28953893

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.

Language: en