Measuring Community Resilience to Coastal Hazards along the Northern Gulf of Mexico.

The abundant research examining aspects of social-ecological resilience, vulnerability, and hazards and risk assessment has yielded insights into these concepts and suggested the importance of quantifying them. Quantifying resilience is complicated by several factors including the varying definitions of the term applied in the research, difficulties involved in selecting and aggregating indicators of resilience, and the lack of empirical validation for the indices derived. This paper applies a new model, called the resilience inference measurement (RIM) model, to quantify resilience to climate-related hazards for 52 U.

Influences on Adaptive Planning to Reduce Flood Risks among Parishes in South Louisiana.

Residents of south Louisiana face a range of increasing, climate-related flood exposure risks that could be reduced through local floodplain management and hazard mitigation planning. A major incentive for community planning to reduce exposure to flood risks is offered by the Community Rating System (CRS) of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The NFIP encourages local collective action by offering reduced flood insurance premiums for individual policy holders of communities where suggested risk-reducing measures have been implemented.

Co-evolution of wetland landscapes, flooding, and human settlement in the Mississippi River Delta Plain.

River deltas all over the world are sinking beneath sea-level rise, causing significant threats to natural and social systems. This is due to the combined effects of anthropogenic changes to sediment supply and river flow, subsidence, and sea-level rise, posing an immediate threat to the 500-1,000 million residents, many in megacities that live on deltaic coasts. The Mississippi River Deltaic Plain (MRDP) provides examples for many of the functions and feedbacks, regarding how human river management has impacted source-sink processes in coastal deltaic basins, resulting in human settlements more at risk to coastal storms.

Modeling land use and land cover changes in a vulnerable coastal region using artificial neural networks and cellular automata.

As one of the most vulnerable coasts in the continental USA, the Lower Mississippi River Basin (LMRB) region has endured numerous hazards over the past decades. The sustainability of this region has drawn great attention from the international, national, and local communities, wanting to understand how the region as a system develops under intense interplay between the natural and human factors. A major problem in this deltaic region is significant land loss over the years due to a combination of natural and human factors.

Applying a community resilience framework to examine household emergency planning and exposure-reducing behavior among residents of Louisiana's industrial corridor.

Residents facing environmental hazards can take steps to reduce their exposure risks, and these actions may be considered adaptations that can enhance the overall resilience of communities. Applying concepts from social-ecological resilience theory, the authors examine emergency planning and exposure-reducing behaviors among residents of the upper Industrial Corridor of Louisiana and explore the extent to which the behaviors are associated with key theoretical influences on community resilience: exposure, vulnerability, and the "adaptive capacity" of residents. The behaviors of interest are adoption of a household emergency plan in the case of acute exposure events (like chemical spills), and limiting outdoor activities in response to Air Quality Index reports, thus potentially reducing chronic exposure risks.

Measuring Capacity for Resilience among Coastal Counties of the US Northern Gulf of Mexico Region.

Many have voiced concern about the long-term survival of coastal communities in the face of increasingly intense storms and sea level rise. In this study we select indicators of key theoretical concepts from the social-ecological resilience literature, aggregate those indicators into a resilience-capacity index, and calculate an index score for each of the 52 coastal counties of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Building upon Cutter's Social Vulnerability Index work [1], we use Factor Analysis to combine 43 variables measuring demographics, social capital, economic resources, local government actions, and environmental conditions within the counties.

Achievement of Climate Planning Objectives among U.S. Member Cities of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

In an effort to address climate change, many cities have joined the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) whose members commit to work toward five specific program objectives designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This study examines the extent to which 257 member cities in the US have been successful in achieving these program milestones and identifies factors that may explain variation in the performance of member cities. Potential influences on milestone attainment include socioeconomic, political and ideological characteristics of residents, length of ICLEI membership, existence of other climate programs within the state, and local environmental pressures.

Predictors of business return in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

We analyzed the business reopening process in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which hit the region on August 29, 2005, to better understand what the major predictors were and how their impacts changed through time. A telephone survey of businesses in New Orleans was conducted in October 2007, 26 months after Hurricane Katrina. The data were analyzed using a modified spatial probit regression model to evaluate the importance of each predictor variable through time.

A new method for estimating carbon dioxide emissions from transportation at fine spatial scales.

Detailed estimates of carbon dioxide (CO) emissions at fine spatial scales are useful to both modelers and decision makers who are faced with the problem of global warming and climate change. Globally, transport related emissions of carbon dioxide are growing. This letter presents a new method based on the volume-preserving principle in the areal interpolation literature to disaggregate transportation-related CO emission estimates from the county-level scale to a 1 km grid scale.

Business return in New Orleans: decision making amid post-Katrina uncertainty.

Background: Empirical observations on how businesses respond after a major catastrophe are rare, especially for a catastrophe as great as Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans, Louisiana on August 29, 2005. We analyzed repeated telephone surveys of New Orleans businesses conducted in December 2005, June 2006, and October 2007 to understand factors that influenced decisions to re-open amid post-disaster uncertainty.

Methodology/principal Findings: Businesses in the group of professional, scientific, and technical services reopened the fastest in the near term, but differences in the rate of reopening for businesses stratified by type became indistinguishable in the longer term (around two years later).

Socioeconomic inequality of cancer mortality in the United States: a spatial data mining approach.

Background: The objective of this study was to demonstrate the use of an association rule mining approach to discover associations between selected socioeconomic variables and the four most leading causes of cancer mortality in the United States. An association rule mining algorithm was applied to extract associations between the 1988-1992 cancer mortality rates for colorectal, lung, breast, and prostate cancers defined at the Health Service Area level and selected socioeconomic variables from the 1990 United States census. Geographic information system technology was used to integrate these data which were defined at different spatial resolutions, and to visualize and analyze the results from the association rule mining process.