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Community Resilience to Coastal Hazards: An Analysis of Two Geographical Scales in Louisiana

Quantifying resilience is difficulties due to the different definitions of resilience, the interchangeable uses with two other terms vulnerability and adaptability, as well as the lack of consensus on what indicators should be selected to quantifying resilience.
This thesis research studied the community resilience in Louisiana by applying the Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) model at two geographic levels: county level and zip code level. The RIM model accesses resilience by using three dimensions (exposure, damage, and recovery) and two abilities (vulnerability and adaptability). The types of coastal hazards included in this study were: coastal, flooding, hurricane/tropical storm, tornado, and severe storm/thunder storm. The study time period was 2000 to 2010. K-means clustering analysis was used to derive the resilience groups. Discriminant analysis was applied to validate the resilience rankings by using a set of indicator variables.
At the county level, discriminant analysis yielded a remarkably high 93.8% classification accuracy when population growth rate in 2000-2010 was used as a recovering indicator and 28 adaptability variables were used to characterize the counties. The accuracy at the zip-code level decreased to 80.2% when population growth rate was used as a recovering indicator. In general, the findings at two different scales are consistent; counties and zip codes with higher socioeconomic status and more resources were found to be more resilient. Interestingly, the three most potent indicators revealed at both scales were the same, which are median rent, median value of owner-occupied housing units and housing density. These findings support the use of the RIM model to further explore adaptability indicators and the underlying process leading to resilience.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-07012013-223832
Date12 July 2013
CreatorsLi, Chi
ContributorsLam, Nina, Reams, Margaret, Laws, Edward
PublisherLSU
Source SetsLouisiana State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-07012013-223832/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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