The Development of Metrics for Measuring the Resilience of Coastal Businesses along the Alabama and Mississippi Working Waterfront

Keywords: Disaster Risk Reduction, Resilience, Natural Hazards, Disasters, Storm Surge, Businesses
Abstract Type: Poster Abstract

Abstract

At the forefront of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction is the need to measure and communicate the concept of resilience to natural hazards and disasters. The measurement of resilience is vital to evaluate and establish baseline conditions of what makes communities resilient. Measuring resilience is difficult; partially because various measurement frameworks often rely on pre-arranged indicator sets that ignore the context of specific places, such as the livelihood context of communities.

The purpose of this poster is to describe the outcome of an MS-AL Sea Grant funded project that entailed the development an integrated measurement framework to better understand drivers of resilience along the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast, USA. To account for context, we used “top-down” quantitative and “bottom-up”, stakeholder-led approaches aimed at better understanding the risk and resilience of businesses and communities along the study area’s working waterfront. The methodology includes a) an accounting of business exposure along the MS-AL coast to sea level rise and hurricane storm surge hazards; b) working with stakeholders on the identification of context-specific characteristics that drive the resilience of the coastal businesses and communities; and c) the application of resilience metrics to better understand gaps in the resilience of businesses and their communities. With improved resilience metrics, our vision is to provide governments, risk managers, community and business leaders, and researchers new opportunities to create local initiatives and equitable public policy programs to increase the capacity to mitigate, respond, and recover effectively and efficiently from damaging natural hazard events.