Achieving Residential Coastal Communities Resilient to Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change

Abstract

Coastal cities in the Southeast and Gulf Coast of the United States are at an increased risk of tropical cyclones (hurricanes) due to the combined effects of urbanization, rapid economic development, and climate change. Current building codes and standards focus on minimum performance criteria for individual buildings exposed to severe hazard events to ensure occupant safety. However, they do not consider the resilience of buildings and building portfolios, which are key factors in determining whether a community can respond to and recover from a severe natural hazard event. Light-frame wood residential buildings dominate the residential market in the US, represent a significant percentage of the investment in the built environment, and are especially vulnerable to hurricane winds and storm surge in coastal areas. Our study of the impact of various hurricane and climate change scenarios on the performance of coastal residential communities reveals that decision-making at the community level is needed to develop rational engineering and urban planning policies, to mitigate the impact of hurricane wind and storm surge, and to adapt to climate change. The results suggest that fundamental changes in the current building regulatory process may be necessary.

Hidden costs to building foundations due to sea level rise in a changing climate

“…Supplementary Fig. S2.3c shows the anticipated SLR scenarios based on NOAA projections 54 which has been used in previous studies 6,8 . The ground water estimation is summarized in step 2(b) in Fig.…”

A novel framework to study community-level social and physical impacts of hurricane-induced winds through synthetic scenario analysis

“…Besides wind hazard modelling, extensive research has been conducted to characterize hurricane storm surge (Weisberg and Zheng, 2008;Dietrich et al, 2013;Sebastian et al, 2014), surgeinduced coastal inundation (Torres et al, 2015;van Berchum et al, 2019), and combined hurricane wind-storm surge behavior (Li et al, 2012;Unnikrishnan and Barbato 2017;Bushra et al, 2019). Despite the fact that hurricane wind modeling matured remarkably over the past 3 decades, wind speed estimation presented in many existing hazard models and in building codes and design standards primarily focus on the performance evaluation of individual buildings or facilities against constant design speed over a large area (Pant and Cha 2018;Adhikari et al, 2021) and do not provide guidelines to account for spatial variation of wind speeds over a large area.…”

“…Previous studies (e.g., Vickery et al, 2006b;Li and Ellingwood 2006;Baradaranshoraka et al, 2017;Kakareko et al, 2017;Salman and Li 2018;Masoomi et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2020;Nofal et al, 2021) often used fragility functions as reliable tools for estimating the various level of damage probabilities for structures given hurricane-induced hazard intensity. Many of these studies are based on probabilistic approaches and have evaluated damage and losses to residential buildings subject to hurricane wind under stationary conditions (Pinelli et al, 2004;Deierlein et al, 2020;Adhikari et al, 2021).…”

“…Besides physical impacts, socioeconomic impacts also shape post-disaster recovery of a community, which is necessary to account for in community risk management (Masterson et al, 2014;van de Lindt et al, 2020). Unfortunately, hurricane risk assessment modules have often been limited to estimating physical damages to the built environment (e.g., Pinelli et al, 2004;Vickery et al, 2006a;Xu and Brown 2008;Kakareko et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2020;Adhikari et al, 2021). Studies used various proxy indicators, including health condition, age, race, gender, poverty, and income, to estimate the social vulnerability of community (Fekete 2009;Bjarnadottir et al, 2010;Abbas and Routray 2014;Rufat et al, 2019;Drakes et al, 2021).…”

“…To move toward this goal, community planners need to be provided with tools and actionable frameworks that enable them to demonstrate disparate community level impacts to make equityinformed decisions. The majority of available frameworks in the literature, however, focus on estimating damage and direct economic losses to the built environment at the individual property level and consequently ignore the social impacts of such destructions (e.g., Pinelli et al, 2004;Vickery et al, 2006a;Xu and Brown 2008;Kakareko et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2020;Adhikari et al, 2021). Therefore, we focus the scope of our study on hurricane-induced wind hazards.…”