CoPe EAGER: Modeling the Social Ecology of Coastal Flood Risk

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Coastal flooding is projected to worsen in the future due to a combination of continued expansion of coastal cities and increasing environmental variability. Unfortunately, many people in coastal areas lack the resources needed to avoid living and working in areas at risk of flooding, and experience great hardships when flooding occurs, finding it extremely difficult to recover their housing, health, and ability to return to work after flood events. In contrast, affluent urban areas are typically better protected, recover more quickly, and may even experience significant improvements after a flood event. This raises a deeply alarming concern that rising sea levels and more frequent and intense coastal flood events will not only impose enormous human and property costs on coastal communities, but might also deepen inequality, amplify social divisions and place long-term burdens on poor and marginalized communities. Such outcomes could in turn create conditions conducive to less trust in the political system and higher levels of civil unrest. This project seeks to better understand how the impacts of coastal flooding vary across social strata and identifies modeling tools and interventions, including community-based, policy and management options, that can be applied to mitigate coastal flood risks and constrain the cascade of negative outcomes. The work derives models that can inform policy debates over managing coastal flood risk, has the potential to empower vulnerable communities to engage in more effective and equitable flood planning and management, and expands workforce capacity in convergence approaches. This project develops and tests a knowledge platform and action framework that integrates fine-resolution flood modeling with socio-economic inequality analysis to assess fast and slow onset coastal flood risks and vulnerabilities at the household and community levels, with an emphasis on the distribution of impacts across social strata. Further analysis assesses implications for governance within and across communities. Pilot research focuses on two regions of California with high risks of flooding: the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Region. The goal of this research is to assess the extent to which flood visualization tools co-developed with vulnerable and differentiated communities can identify fair, affordable, site specific interventions that can mitigate flood risk and constrain negative social outcomes including long-term burdens on the poor, political outcomes that favor the rich, and conditions conducive to civil unrest. The research develops a novel quantitative framework for understanding and assessing the dynamic relationship between flood risk and socio-economic inequality. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.