PREPARED BY: Nina Lam, Professor LSU Environmental Sciences January 29, 2013 More information on symposium: http://superfund.oregonstate.edu/LSUSymposium1.13

1. Disasters and Resilience:
Issues and Perspectives
PREPARED BY:
Nina Lam, Professor
LSU Environmental Sciences
January 29, 2013

2. A Pressing
Global Concern
Response, recovery, and
resilience to environmental
disasters is a pressing
global concern;
Solution requires
collaboration among
researchers from multiple
disciplines, policy makers,
community stakeholders,
first responders, and the
citizens.

3. Active participation from international, federal, state,
NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies

4. Active participation from international, federal, state,
NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies

5. Active participation from international, federal, state,
NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies

6. Active participation from international, federal, state,
NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies
A proactive response to
managing the most
vulnerable coast in the U.S.

7. Active participation from international, federal, state,
NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies
An inspiring documentary
reinforcing the threat of
climate change and the need
for preparedness.

8. Active participation from international, federal, state,
NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies
Do we have a document
similar to this? Which
communities recover
and sustain, and why?

10. International
Perspectives
• How are we going to pay for disasters?
• Shifting the responsibility to citizens to
manage risk
• Avoid complacency (even disasters do not
directly affect you, the effects will propagate)
• Need to evaluate all aspects of resilience
• Need curriculum to teach resilience
• Resilience to disasters is directly linked to
development
• What will risk look like in 25 years?

11. Federal,
state, NGO
Perspectives
• Are we subsidizing risk? Should the
government pay for it (Insurance does not
do that)? Where is the revenue to fund
disasters.
• Decisions made at the local level often
times are short-term
• Efficiency has become enemy of resilience
• How to maintain critical functions?
• How to involve businesses - to invest in a
risky environment?

12. • Business challenge
- company uses past as proxies to future
- must quantify risks and investment return
- why invest 50 years from now?
Reinsurance
industry
perspectives
The great fires of the 1870s were a classic tipping point,
which pumps each group to do the best
Have we reached our tipping point?
•
•
•
•
•
•
leveraging insurance as a tool
recovery funds can incenticize prevention
inject personal responsibility
link top-down and bottom-up
science is important
talk to people

13. Academic
Perspectives
The need for a new national framework for a
“culture of disaster resilience” that includes:
1. Public awareness and responsibility of managing
local risk
2. Establishing the economic and human value of
resilience to encourage long-term resilience
3. Metrics and measurement for understanding
resilience and monitoring progress
4. Creating local capacity (bottom-up approaches)
5. Identifying sound policies (top-down)
6. Communications!
(Source: NRC report: Disaster Resilience, 2012)

14. The new dual
challenges:
Resilience
and
Sustainability
Sustainability: “the capacity of society to meet its
current needs while assuring the well being of future
generations.”
Resilience: “the capacity for a system to survive,
adapt, and flourish in the face of change and
uncertainty.”
Resilience insures continuity;
Sustainability insures balance;
Resilience is a prerequisite of sustainability;
Long-term resilience is sustainability

15. The new dual
challenges:
Resilience
and
Sustainability
Challenges:
- Our tendency to manage risks rather than
building resilience
- Reactive and neglect long-term needs
- Beyond disasters, should consider slowmoving threats
- Long-term sustainability may be at odds with
short-term resilience
- The need to understand the dynamics, as
tightly coupled systems
- Integrated assessment

16. The new dual
challenges:
Resilience
and
Sustainability
The path forward:
- Learning and communication
- Collaboration across sectors
- Establishing a culture of resilience
- Developing methods for evaluating
resilience
- Developing resilient and sustainable
systems
(Source: Hecht, Resilience and Sustainability Workshop, NCSE
Conference 2013)

17. What is the best way to measure
community resilience to coastal hazards?

18. Why is resilience measurement important?
• Allow identification of indicators that may increase or
decrease resilience; speed recovery after disastrous
events
• Allow assessment through time and across space
(How do we know we are making progress?)
• Essential tools for sustainable planning and decision
making

19. Why is resilience measurement so difficult?
• Numerous definitions
• No empirical validation
Some attempts: e.g., Cutter’s social vulnerability index: low r (-0.099) with
#presidential disaster declarations
• Why additive model?
• Why certain weights?
• Difficult to generalize:
e.g., Principal Component Analysis is not an inferential statistics
• Data availability

20. The four
states of
resilience in
ecosystems
(modified from Liu
et al. 2006)

21. Do Natural-System Concepts of
Resilience Apply to Human
Communities?

22. Our Framework
The Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) Model
Three dimensions and two abilities

23. Our Framework – Dynamic
The Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) Model
Reduce vulnerability
Reduce exposure

25. How to Quantify these Concepts?
• Exposure – natural disturbances
• Damage – property, injuries, crops
• Recovery – population growth, income
growth
• Adaptations – social-economics, public
functions

27. Hurricanes 1987-2007
(Source: Arenas, Brito, Lam, and Liu, 2009)

28. Hurricanes 1851-2007
(Source: Arenas, Brito, Lam, and Liu, 2009)

29. Hurricane density estimation using kernel size of 80-km

31. http://www.floodsite.net/juniorfloodsite/html/en/student/thingstoknow/geography/katrina2.html
(accessed 04/16/2012)

32. An Example
• 52 U.S. coastal counties along the Gulf of Mexico; data
for 1998-2008
• K-means clustering: classified into 4 groups according
to adjusted # coastal hazards, property damage,
population growth (“resilience states”)
• 28 variables representing demographic, social,
economic, government, environmental, and health
• Discriminant analysis led to a very high degree of
accuracy (94.2% counties were correctly classified)!

35. We developed the Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) model to assess
the resiliency of the 52 counties along the GOM. (Source: Lam, Reams, K. Li, Baker, C. Li,
and Mata, 2013)

36. The ten most potent variables in discriminating the
resilience groups
1. Percent of population over 65 years old
2. Percent of the workforce that is employed
3. Percent of female-headed households
4. Mean elevation
5. 3-year average chronic illness deaths, 1998-2000
6. Percent of population under 5 years old
7. Percent of population over 25 years old with no high school diploma
8. Percent of population below poverty
9. Percent of hispanic population
10. Median rent

37. Plots of the four groups (Left) and top 10 variables (right) on the first two
discriminant functions

38. Results
• Very interpretable
• High resilience is associated with higher percent of civilian
labor force and higher mean elevation, they are mostly in
Florida and Alabama
• Low resilience is associated with higher percent poverty,
female-headed households, percent of pop without a highschool diploma, they are mostly in Louisiana, Mississippi, and
Texas
• Outliers: Lowest resilience in Louisiana and Mississippi, partly
due to the catastrophic events of Katrina and Rita

39. Conclusions
•
Obviously need refinements, but a promising approach
•
The RIM approach has validation
•
The RIM approach can be inferential
•
Ongoing research:
- Testing the five Gulf states – 534 counties and their zipcode
areas
Caribbean countries
The Netherlands
China earthquake in 2009
- Evaluating the coastal sustainability in Louisiana using a
Coupled Natural-Human (CNH) coastal system
- Health resilience

40. Acknowledgements
Funding Agencies:
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOMRE)
National Science Foundation (NSF)
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
Gulf of Mexico Sea Grant Program (GoMA)
U.S. Forest Service (USFS)
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)

41. Our Resilience Research Group
Faculty Collaborator: Dr. Margaret Reams
Post-Doctoral Research Associate:
Dr. Fei Wang; Dr. Yi Qiang; Dr. Amit Kulkarni; Dr. Helbert Arenas
Prior Graduate Research Assistants:
Ariele Baker, Lauren DeFrank, Danielle LaRock, Alison Martin,
Kelsey Clinton, Corrinthia Hinton, Betsy Paille
Current Graduate Research Assistants:
Kenan Li, Lillian Mata, Chi Li, Amit Kulkarni, Camille Golden