Integrating social vulnerability into federal flood risk management planning

While flood risk management planning in the United States has focused on flood control structures designed to protect the economic value of property, it has consistently undervalued other social impacts associated with flooding. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) recently initiated research aime...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Journal of flood risk management Vol. 6; no. 4; pp. 332 - 344
Main Authors:	Cutter, S.L., Emrich, C.T., Morath, D.P., Dunning, C.M.
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	London Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01-12-2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Subjects:	Dams Flood Flood control Flood insurance risk management social vulnerability USA AS, South Atlantic
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	While flood risk management planning in the United States has focused on flood control structures designed to protect the economic value of property, it has consistently undervalued other social impacts associated with flooding. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) recently initiated research aimed at understanding how to incorporate social characteristics into the measures currently utilised in flood control project evaluation and consideration. This paper proposes a methodology for incorporating a known measure of social vulnerability, the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI), into USACE civil works planning. Using the USACE South Atlantic Division as the study area, this paper evaluates eight different variations of the social vulnerability metric and their potential deployment in USACE projects. Each formulation is compared with the original‐computed SoVI as a means to test its spatial and statistical sensitivity, including an assessment of each variant's robustness, reducibility, scalability, and transferability. Results indicate that while it is possible to create simplified, yet robust, versions of SoVI for individual places, such ‘lite’ metrics tend to fall short in areas of scalability and transferability in relation to the original SoVI formulation.
Bibliography:	istex:E6814C75BADCD5EC35774D226AA1E95DFD940F2E ArticleID:JFR312018 ark:/67375/WNG-SB0V186D-1 ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	1753-318X 1753-318X
DOI:	10.1111/jfr3.12018