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Researchers say coastal community<br />
stakeholders need to be involved to make<br />
their towns more resilient from storms<br />
MCLEAN, VA <strong>Nov</strong>. 29, 2016 –<br />
Coastal storms can cause surges,<br />
sea-level rise, and cyclone winds<br />
that devastate communities. But<br />
emergency management experts in<br />
a new study detail a method for involving<br />
local stakeholders in planning<br />
for such extreme events and<br />
thereby helping such vulnerable areas<br />
in becoming more resilient.<br />
Coastal communities’ ability to<br />
plan for, absorb, recover and adapt<br />
from destructive hurricanes is becoming<br />
more urgent. As of 2010,<br />
approximately 52 percent of the<br />
United States’ population lived in<br />
vulnerable coastal watershed counties,<br />
and that number is expected<br />
to grow. Globally, almost half of the<br />
world’s population lives along or<br />
near coastal areas.<br />
“In general, risk management has<br />
not been sufficiently focused on<br />
coastal resilience, with community<br />
stakeholders involved in the process<br />
of making their coastline, as<br />
a system, more resilient to coastal<br />
storms,” according to the study,<br />
“Enabling Stakeholder Involvement<br />
in Coastal Disaster Resilience Planning,”<br />
by George Washington University<br />
researchers Thomas Bostick,<br />
Thomas Holzer, and Shahryar Sarkani.<br />
Their study was published in<br />
the online version of Risk Analysis,<br />
a publication of the Society for Risk<br />
Analysis.<br />
“This research demonstrates<br />
a methodology for<br />
involving stakeholders<br />
in discussions that make<br />
their coastlines more resilient,”<br />
says Bostick. After<br />
disasters strike, local<br />
stakeholders are often surprised<br />
and frustrated with<br />
the damages inflicted on<br />
their communities and seek greater<br />
involvement in reducing risk. That<br />
frustration can be addressed by investing<br />
more in physical infrastructures<br />
to protect against flooding. But<br />
the needed infrastructure can be expensive,<br />
such as the $14.5 billion the<br />
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was<br />
given to reinforce New Orleans after<br />
the 2005 destruction caused by<br />
Hurricane Katrina, an amount of<br />
federal support that most high risk<br />
areas are unlikely to receive.<br />
Recognizing that a methodology<br />
was missing for integrating<br />
34<br />
Thomas Bostick<br />
coastal stakeholders into the process<br />
of identifying and selecting of<br />
resilience-enhancing projects, the<br />
authors conducted a case study with<br />
data from a stakeholder meeting in<br />
Mobile Bay, Alabama, to demonstrate<br />
a method for engaging<br />
stakeholders over a<br />
longer period to identify<br />
what the group considered<br />
the community’s most significant<br />
critical functions<br />
and project initiatives to<br />
preserve those functions<br />
under different scenarios.<br />
Mobile Bay, Alabama’s<br />
only port for ocean-going ships and<br />
an entry point for smaller recreational<br />
and commercial vessels, has<br />
seen population growth and accompanying<br />
demand for housing, infrastructure<br />
development, and other<br />
changes that have impacted natural<br />
ecological systems. During tropical<br />
storms and hurricane events, Mobile<br />
Bay’s Eastern Shore is vulnerable<br />
to coastal erosion and sediment<br />
transfer into the bay.<br />
A workshop involving approximately<br />
30 participants was held in<br />
2015 at the National Oceanic and