Evolving Geographical Disparities of Community Disaster Resilience in the United States

Keywords: CRIM; Disaster Risk Analysis; CyberInfrastructure;
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

As hailed by the World Disasters Report, the proportion of disasters caused by climatic and weather events has risen from 76% in the 2000s to 83% in the 2010s. Evaluating community resilience and identifying key factors that play a role in mitigating disaster impacts is critical for locating vulnerable social groups and helping decision-makers formulate strategies to enhance resilience. Rural populations, however, respond to disasters differently than urban. We hypothesize that rural communities have lower resilience scores and different socioeconomic and environmental factors that could increase their resilience compared to urban areas. The objectives are three-fold:- (1) Developing a self-validated Customized Resilience Inference Measurement model which can compute the spatial and temporal patterns of resilience indexes; (2) Analyzing the difference of resilience indices between rural and urban counties spatially and temporally across from 2000 to 2020; (3) Using Bayesian Network to identify two sets of driving factors and therefore risk reduction strategies amongst the rural and urban communities. First, hazard threats, damages, and recoveries every ten years were calculated utilizing SHELDUS data and the Census data to delineate communities’ evolving performance and resilience during historical disasters. The damage was estimated by per capita economic losses, and the recovery was based on population stability. Second, the rural-urban continuum codes were used to obtain the difference in trends for these communities. Lastly, Bayesian Networks developed separately for the communities probed into the relations that the indices have with socioeconomic variables. This study has exhaustively shown the disparities between rural to urban communities.