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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

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