Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilities - Climate ...

Vulnerability and Impacts on Human Development 69evaluated the value of beach width using a hedonic pricing model 8 and found that residentialproperty values may decline substantially in places affected by increased erosionrates and costs of sand nourishment. The analysis suggests that residential housingvalues in coastal regions may be sensitive to the availability of sand for maintainingbeaches. Chapter 3 of this report discusses some of the impacts on natural resourcessystems that can also provide ecosystem services that benefit human systems (see alsoReal Estate and Tax Revenue, section 4.4.5) Public listening sessions conducted in NorthCarolina in 2010 raised concerns over anticipated community costs of adapting vulnerableinfrastructure in response to potential climate change impacts as well as respondingto increased job losses in fisheries, reduction of agricultural lands and the farmingindustry, loss of manufacturing plants along the water, and declines in tourism (Brownet al., 2010). On an individual level, inspirational and tacit values of coastal lagoons, orsense of place, are difficult to value and often overlooked in evaluating impacts (Anthonyet al., 2009).Since the 2009 NCA, considerable advancements have been made towards understandingthe links between environmental stressors and social vulnerability in coastalareas and developing the empirical basis for assessing differential impacts. Most ofthe extant research examines a single stressor; for example, Lin and Morefield (2011)produced a relative ranking of vulnerability for coastal communities in the NationalEstuary Program, incorporating measures of estuary conditions such as water quality,sediment, contaminants, benthic quality, coupled with human-induced land-use changessuch as impervious surface and wetland loss, and socio-economics. In the contextof hurricanes, several recent papers examine the relationship between hurricane hazardssuch as windfields and storm surge and the differential impact on social groupsin coastal areas with case studies of the Mississippi coast after Hurricane Katrina (Burton,2010), Miami (Bjarnadottir et al., 2011) and Sarasota, Florida (Frazier et al., 2010a).Frazier and others (2010a) concluded that future sea-level rise contributes to the spatialextent of storm-surge impacts even without an increase in intensity or severity ofhurricanes. Bjarnadottir and others (2011) also examined storm surge-height and windspeeds for various future climate scenarios and concluded that more deaths and injurieswill be expected because of hurricane frequency and higher intensities. As discussed inpreceding chapters, an increase in hurricane frequency is not indicated by recent climatemodels and trends.Another area of integrated hazard assessment examines the relationship betweenpopulations displaced by hurricanes and their underlying vulnerability, resilience, andhurricane risk (Mitchell et al., 2011). In the development of a comparative index of hurricanedisplacement, Esnard and others (2011) found that, of the 158 coastal countiesstudied from Texas to North Carolina, coastal Florida counties are the most vulnerable,especially those in South Florida because of the combination of hurricane risk probabilityand extant social vulnerability. Another study examined the relative vulnerability of8 A hedonic model is based on price factors that are determined both by the internal characteristics of thegood being sold and the external factors affecting the value of those goods. One example is the housingmarket in which the price of housing is affected by factors such as the size and characteristics of the house,the neighborhood, proximity to schools and hospitals and mortgage interest rates.