emerge within a broad selection of literature from different schools on climate change, disaster risk .... to sea level rise between 1993 and 2009 could be as high as 30% (Nicholls and Cazenave. 2011). ...... Pielke Jr, R. A., Gratz, J., Landsea, C. W., Collins, D., Saunders, M. A., and Musulin, R. 2008. .... Simon, H. A. 1977.
Climate Change Risks, Ecosystem Feedback, Vulnerability and Resilience In Urbanized Coastal Zones By Daniel M. Gnatz
Acknowledgements I am thankful for the opportunity to research and write about the risks and ecosystem interactions that will be faced by coastal cities as climate change progresses. We are living in both a very dangerous time and but also a time of tremendous opportunities to put things right in our interactions with the natural world. It is also my pleasure to acknowledge the help and support of my Capstone Committee, my Major Professor, Dr. Steffen Schmidt and my committee members, Dr. Amy Hirons and Dr. Tamara Frank and the loving support of my wife and partner, Paty for the time we have spent together traveling, working and talking about ideas.
2
Table of Contents 1
Introduction
4
2
Purpose and Objectives
5
3
Methods
6
4
Review
7
4.5
What is the Coastal Zone?
7
4.6
Climate Change Hazards in Urbanized Coastal Zones
10
4.6.1 Sea Level Rise
10
4.6.2 Relative, Local and Regional Sea Level Rise
14
4.6.3 Tropical Storm Frequency and Intensity
16
4.6.4 Storm Surge and Coastal Flooding
20
4.6.5 Water Systems and Ecosystem Services
21
4.6.6 Increasing Risks in Urbanized Coastal Zones
23
4.6.7 Interacting Drivers of Risk in UCZs
27
5
Vulnerability, Capacity and Resilience in the UCZ
28
5.1
Concepts of Vulnerability
30
5.2
Towards a Unified Framework
33
5.3
Formality and Informality
46
5.4
Formality and the Structures of Domination
50
5.5
The Ad Hoc Development of Urban Areas
54
5.6
Coupled Natural Human Systems (CNH)
55
6
Case Studies
63
6.1
Superstorm Sandy
63
6.2
Hurricane Katrina
67
7
Conclusions and Future Areas of Research
75
8
Key Concepts and Terms
78
9
References
82
3
Figures Figure 1: Construction site in Tianjin, China, July 2014
10
Figure 2: The coming together of hazards and vulnerability
37
Figure 3: Hazards and vulnerability as superimposed triangular waves
39
Figure 4: Vulnerability as z-axis of a three-dimensional shape (Luers 2005)
41
Figure 5: Vulnerability Conceptual Framework (Cutter and Enrich 2006)
41
Figure 6: Water source in an informal settlement in a Beijing suburb
49
Figure 7: An informal market in Qinhuangdao, China
50
Figure 8: Urban overall population vs. urban-hukuo population
51
Figure 9: Panarchy Based on Holling and Gunderson (2002a)
59
Figure 10: Interactions: natural and human systems (Scheffer et al. 2002)
62
Figure 11: Dynamic interaction of ecosystem with human subsystems
63
Figure 12: The Negative Arctic Oscillation
65
Figure 13: US Ecosystem protection from SLR with projections
68
Figure 14: New Orleans wetlands loss since 1932 to 2000
73
Tables and Boxes Table 1: Coastal Vs Overall Population, Land % and Densities by Continent 25 Table 1: AR5 WGII Key Findings: Coastal Systems and Potential Impacts
30
Box 1: IPCC AR5 UCZ Relevant Climate Change Findings
13
4
1
Introduction Global climate change is one of the most critical issues of our time, and its
ramifications are far reaching. Most global cities are located near the coasts (de Sherbinin et al. 2007) with many inhabiting low-lying coastal zones (de Sherbinin et al. 2007; McGranahan et al. 2007). This puts these cities at heightened risk of climate change hazards, but physical hazards alone will not predict the impacts of climate change. While many models have been put forward to help predict the nature and extent of climate change impacts, most have focused on the physical and environmental processes at play and have done less to understand how physical hazards interact with social dynamics to create risks. Vulnerability and resilience research has recognized that social forces interact with exposure to hazards to create impacts but, in general, this work has focused narrowly on particular localities. Some papers have examined patterns that emerge within a broad selection of literature from different schools on climate change, disaster risk management, adaptation and response; they draw conclusions from these reviews that can point towards a more unified view to help make predictions that can be applied within wide ranging local contexts. This paper reviews the literature of climate change, disaster risk management, adaptation, response and capacity, broadly, across research perspectives, but will focus mainly on the urbanized coastal zones (UCZ) for analysis of local case studies. Research of this type can point to some general conclusions that may guide policy formulation and create better adaptation interventions (Berrang-Ford et al. 2010).
5
2
Purpose and Objectives Rapid urbanization and climate change, two products of human economic
development and manipulation of the environment, are coinciding in ways that will increase urban vulnerability and may threaten future development, human quality of life, and economic and social stability (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2011). Growing urban populations will create a potential for an increased number of climate change-related disasters in urban areas worldwide, but in urban areas within coastal zones the threats may be still greater. Alternately, it has been noted (Leichenko 2011; Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2011) that urbanization offers opportunities to enhance resilience, as they can become seedbeds for the incubation of innovative ideas and their implementations to create resilience. Yet those approaches that focus predominantly on urban areas as human systems, and attempt to promote a narrowly defined resilience that does not include considerations of the wider ecosystem, will fail in their attempts if they do not consider the effects of their interconnections with 1natural systems. Furthermore, areas with increased hazards brought about by global climate change will, of necessity, implement larger responses to protect their assets. This creates the increasing danger that long-term environmental concerns will be given less importance than preventing shortterm losses, and this short-term focus will undermine future safety and could lead to far greater long-term losses.
1
Natural systems include combinations of biotic and abiotic systems, and whether we refer to them as ecosystems often becomes simply a matter of framing. If we are looking mainly at life processes and their supports and interconnections, we usually refer to them as ecosystems. However, if we are mainly concerned with abiotic processes such as the movement of tectonic plates and the physical processes of coastal erosion, we will refer to them as physical systems. In this paper, I will often use what I consider the broader term, natural systems, to connote the any biotic or abiotic system that humans incorporate into their social systems, an incorporation which, in turn, affects larger abiotic and biotic processes.
6
The purpose of this paper will be to review the state of vulnerability and resilience research with particular emphasis on the projected effects of climate change on urban coastal areas. Paths toward urban vulnerability or resilience take shape based upon local realities, possibilities, constraints and obstacles; and the impacts of natural disasters are mediated by local social, structural, infrastructural and political circumstances (RomeroLankao et al. 2012). In general, the urban poor are among the most vulnerable to natural disasters because they live in places that others do not want to live, i.e. areas of marginal, unstable land with overcrowded and dangerous conditions (Cronin and Guthrie 2011), particularly in developing countries where populations are least able to adapt to climate change (Beg et al. 2002). Studies of vulnerability and resilience may help point the way towards improved responses, adaptations, and social and behavioral changes that will be necessary in the face of increased climate change impacts (Ibarraran et al. 2010). This paper will begin with a literature review of the physical hazards that can be expected to increase in urbanized coastal as climate change progresses. It will then review the literature of social and ecological thought on vulnerability and resilience in urban systems. It will sketch out some ideas for frameworks of convergence and human ecosystem interactions and will consider two case studies from urbanized coastal zones. Finally, it will draw some conclusions and point the way to some possibilities for future research.
3
Methods Through reviews of scientific literature on climate change hazards in the
urbanized coastal zones, the literature of vulnerability and resilience and the literature of human system ecosystem/natural system interaction, this paper will attempt to develop
7
some ideas for an integrative framework that can be used to consider vulnerability and ecosystem degradation in terms of human/ecosystem interactions.
4
Review
4.5
What is the Coastal Zone? Coastal zones, or those areas of or surrounding coasts where land meets sea, have
long been some of the most sought after lands for human habitation. The reasons for this are multifold and many probably lie buried within the far reaches of the human psyche. No doubt people are attracted to the coasts because the sea holds a profound natural beauty, but it is also true that these areas are intricately tied to attempts to create empires or to improve the human condition through development and trade. As such, many early civilizations developed cities within these zones. These cities became the connecting points of major sea-based trade routes and centers of development, cultural exchange and commerce, and have continued in this role over many historic periods (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2011). Among competing definitions of the coast and coastal zone, some define coasts as that area which is within the zone of influence of coastal ecosystem processes (Wong et al. 2014). Others define coastal areas as the territory within 100 miles (or 100 kilometers), of the coast (Cutter et al. 2007); however, this includes many areas that are not immediately threatened by coastal inundation due to sea level rise or storm surge. To examine areas that might be threatened, it is better to move away from definitions of the coastal zone based solely on proximity to the sea, to look at areas adjacent to the sea that are at low-elevation or below sea level. These areas have been defined by McGranahan (2007) as the low-elevation coastal zone (LECZ). 8
In the first in-depth study of populations living in this hazardous area McGranahan et al. (2007) defined the LECZ as the continuous area adjacent to the sea and less than 10 meters above sea level (Romero-Lankao 2008). Data available for 2010 now includes areas up to 20 meters above sea level with updated population statistics. The extent of these areas, which are at risk for coastal inundation, particularly from storm surge, were originally estimated, based on year 2000 data, to cover 2% of the Earth’s surface but to carry about 10 percent of the world’s population and 13% of the world’s urban population. In the year 2000, therefore, the LECZ had a global population of about 600 million people, with approximately 360 million of these inhabiting urbanized coastal areas (Romero-Lankao 2008; McGranahan 2007). Asia has the largest urban populations within the LECZ (18%), followed by Australia and New Zealand (13%), Small Island States (13%), and Africa (12%). Lowincome and lower-middle income countries have a higher proportion of their urban populations in the LECZ (28%) than high-income countries (12%; Romero-Lankao 2008; McGranahan 2007). What is clear is that coastal urban populations are growing (McGranahan 2005) (see table 1), including those in the LECZ, that these populations are highly threatened and that a significant proportion of the population in these zones are at risk from the combined effects of sea level rise and coastal storms, storm surge and inundation as they converge with issues of population growth, development and social vulnerability (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2011; Romero-Lankao 2008: McGranahan et al. 2007). Development of the LECZ continues at an accelerated rate today. For instance, areas of the coastal zone in China are being developed at an extremely rapid pace (Zhao et al. 2013; McGranahan 2007) and population growth in the LECZ continues. China and 9
Bangladesh have the highest percent of their urban population in the LECZ, with Bangladesh at 46% and a 2.8 % growth rate annually between 1990 and 2000. Some of the natural assets that can be found within coastal zones include biodiversity creating readily available sources of nourishment, temperate climates, and logistical advantage based on transportation by sea (Qinhuangdao informant). As a result, China’s growth rate in the urbanized LECZ was 3.82% annually between 1990 and 2000. This rapid urbanization of the LECZ is a product of an economic strategy by the Chinese government that created zones of economic development in coastal cities (Zhao et al. 2013; McGranahan et al. 2007). Coastal cities were seen by Chinese policy makers as areas of lower operating costs due to a reduction in overland transportation expenditures when moving goods to international markets by sea. Evidence of the high pace of development in Chinese coastal cities can be seen today in the number of construction sites building residential units in cities such as Tianjin (Fig. 1). Risk within these highly populated coastal areas will be componded by a continued increase in physical hazards, which are being brought on by climate forcing associated with antropogenic carbon emissions. These physical hazards are the focus of section 4.3.
Figure 2: Construction site in Tianjin, China, July 2014 10
4.7
Climate Change Hazards in Urbanized Coastal Zones (UCZ) Risks posed by physical hazards in urbanized coastal areas are growing, creating
increasing hazards and are an increasing concern for urban governments in these areas.
4.7.1 Sea level Rise Since at least 1961, the world’s oceans have been expanding as they have absorbed more than 80 % of the additional heat due to climate change (See Box 1). Between 1993 and 2003, ocean expansion was the largest contributor to sea level rise, as it still is today (Church et al. 2013). It is a scientific fact that sea levels are rising, rates of SLR are accelerating, and SLR is predicted to continue. Evidence shows that global average sea level has risen by 1.7 mm per year between 1900 and 2010 and increased to 3.2 mm per year between 1993 and 2010 (Church et al. 2013). About 30% of observed rate of sea level rise has resulted from expansion of ocean water due to increases in the volume, known as themosteric sea level rise (SLR). From 1971 to 2010, the warming of the upper 700 meters of the ocean has caused an estimated mean rate of rise (thermosteric SLR) of 0.6 mm per year (Church et al. 2013). Increases in the overall mass of water in the oceans, caused, for instance, by changes in the hydrologic cycle (more or less precipitation) and melting ice sheets and glaciers are another source of sea level rise. Melting glaciers and losses from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have contributed to recent sea level rise through melting and thawing of these ice formations. In fact, the contribution of melting glaciers to sea level rise between 1993 and 2009 could be as high as 30% (Nicholls and Cazenave 2011). It is estimated that since 2002, changes in the mass of the oceans account for a rise of 1 to 2 mm per year with an uncertainty of about 3% (Church et al. 2013). 11
Although the current and future contribution to sea level rise from Antarctica is subject to large uncertainties, recent studies using extensive satellite observations found that loss of Antarctic sea ice increased by 75 % between 1996 and 2006 (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2011). Some recent estimates of sea level rise are substantially higher than the modelbased estimates in the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (2007) or the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (2014), which do not include sudden changes in ice-sheet dynamics, such as a collapse of glacial ice sheets might cause. AR5 Working Group 1 (WG1) states that some studies have estimated upward bounds of 2.4 m of sea level rise by 2100, but there is no scientific consensus that would help validate these estimates (Church et al. 2013). Many coastal climate change hazards are associated directly or indirectly with sea level rise (SLR). Globally, mean sea level will rise an estimated 18 to 59 cm by the end of the 21st century, and the effects of coastal storms will be compounded by this rise, increasing the potential for storm flooding and damage, inundations, and coastal erosion. SLR will also result in increased salinity in estuaries and coastal aquifers, rising coastal water tables and obstructed drainage. Less indirect impacts, such as those brought by changes in the functions of coastal ecosystems and in the distribution of bottom sediments are also probable since ecosystems such as wetlands, mangrove swamps and coral reefs form natural protections for coastal areas; changes to or loss of these ecosystems will compound the dangers faced by coastal urban areas. It is also worth noting that these ecosystems have already been degraded by urban processes and land use even without the added stressors that global climate change will carry (Nicholls and Wong 2008). The effects of climate change threaten to compound this damage and reduce these natural 12
protections still further, but as urban areas attempt to replace these natural protections with human-engineered ones, economic resources will be strained. Hard shore protections, such as, jetties, seawalls and groynes are often added to protect commercial interests and the real property of land owners along rapidly developing coastlines (Dugan 2011). Such artificial shore protections have been shown to increase erosion in adjacent, down-coast areas (Dugan 2011; Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2011) and could make the problem worse in areas with the most vulnerable populations (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2011). No human-designed system has yet been developed that can do as good a job as the natural systems that anthropogenic environmental change is now impacting. These impacts will be accelerated by climate change (Dugan 2011; Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2011). Box 1: IPCC AR5 UCZ Relevant Climate Change Findings Rising Temperatures • • • • • • • • •
Scientific consensus for warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and many changes observed since the1950s are unprecedented over decades to millennia The atmosphere and ocean have warmed Amounts of snow and ice have diminished Sea level has risen Concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased A globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature shows a warming trend of 0.85 C [0.65 to 1.06] between 1880 and 2012 For the longest period over which measurements are sufficiently complete to produce calculations of regional trends (1901 to 2012), almost the entire world has experienced warming It is virtually certain that the global troposphere has warmed since the mid-20th century It is very likely that the number of cold days and nights has decreased and the number of warm days and nights has increased worldwide
• Severe Weather •
The high latitudes and the equatorial Pacific Ocean are likely to experience an increase in annual mean precipitation by the end of this century 13
• • •
•
• •
By the end of the century in many mid-latitude and subtropical dry regions, mean precipitation will likely decrease, while in many mid-latitude wet regions, mean precipitation will likely increase Extreme precipitation events over most of the mid-latitude land masses and wet tropical regions will very likely become more frequent and intense by the end of this century It is likely that the global range of monsoons and the duration of the season for these systems will increase over the 21st century. Monsoon winds are likely to weaken, but their precipitation is likely to intensify due to the increase in atmospheric moisture Ocean warming accounts the more than 90% of the increased energy accumulated in the climate system between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence) More than 60% of this energy increase in the climate was stored in the upper ocean (0–700 m) during the 40-year period from 1971 to 2010, and about 30% is stored in the ocean below 700 m The ocean likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971, but it is virtually certain that it warmed between 1971 and 2010 It is very likely that regions of the ocean where evaporation dominates have become more saline, while regions where precipitation dominates have become less saline since the 1950s. Regional changes in ocean salinity provide indirect evidence that evaporation and precipitation over the oceans have changed (medium confidence)
Sea Level Rise • • • • •
The rate of sea level rise since 1850 has been greater than the average rate during the previous two thousand years (high confidence) Between 1901 and 2010, global mean sea level rose by 0.19 meters with values between 0.17 and 0.21 meters It is likely that the rate of global mean sea level rise has been continuously increasing since the early 20th century Since the early 1970s, glacier melting and ocean thermal expansion explain about 75% of the observed global mean sea level rise (high confidence) Observations of global mean sea level rise between 1993 and 2010 is consistent with the sum of the observed contributions from ocean thermal expansion (1.1 [0.8 to 1.4] mm yr.), glacier melting (0.76 [0.39 to 1.13] mm yr.) and changes in the Greenland ice sheet (0.33 [0.25 to 0.41] mm yr.), the Antarctic ice sheet (0.27 [0.16 to 0.38] mm yr.), and land water storage
Melting and Thawing • •
Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass Glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover has continued to decrease in extent
Source: IPCC WG1 (2013) Paraphrased by author
14
4.7.2 Relative, Local and Regional Sea Level Rise In its local impacts, sea level rise is not an absolute value. Calculations of relative SLR must take local and regional processes, both natural and anthropogenic, into account. For instance, a concentration of tall buildings may cause compaction of a land area and lead to an increase in relative SLR in densely populated urban areas. Similarly, a depletion of sediment, in a river delta area may cause land subsidence and an increase in relative SLR (Church et al. 2013; Wong et al. 2014). Such sedimentary depletion may be caused by the construction of dams and levees or dredging operations to help keep depths adequate for ship passage or to keep rivers flowing freely to avoid delta jumping. Land subsidence may also be caused by the exploitation of subsurface fluid deposits, such as by water extraction from aquifers or oil extraction. These pressures increasing relative sea level rise are common in many coastal cities. Conversely, areas may be experiencing the accretion of land by sedimentary deposit or by tectonic plate subduction. These processes may cause a reduction in relative SLR, but are not generally associated with anthropogenic pressures arising from coastal urban activities. Some of the well-known short-term impacts of SLR include submergence and inundation, increased incidence of flooding and salt-water intrusion to surface fresh water. Longer acting effects include salt-water intrusion to groundwater and increased erosion, the latter of which can lead to increased land subsidence, and declining wetlands, as sedimentary supplies are outpaced by SLR and erosion (Nicholls and Cazenave 2010). The loss of wetlands in turn causes heightened erosion leading to the vicious cycle of loss and more land subsidence (Church et al. 2013). For example, in areas of land accretion such as the subduction zone in China on the northwest coast of the Bohai sea in cities such as Qinhuangdao and Tianjin, anthropogenic pressures such as dam building, 15
hard armoring of the coast, silt extraction or sand mining have created receding coastlines due to an amplification of erosion (Xue et al. 2009), and an amplification of erosional pressure can expected with sea level rise due to changes in tidal currents in the Bohai Sea (Pelling et al. 2013). Based on whether a local area is experiencing land accretion or subsidence, relative or local SLR may either slow or heighten the effects of climate induced SLR. Provided it is not being offset by erosion, sea level is falling where land is uplifting enough to offset and surpass global mean sea level rise. Examples of this exist in the northern Baltic and Hudson Bay—where the weight of receding glaciers, a kilometer thick during the last ice age, is being unloaded from the land (Nicholls and Cazenave 2010). Conversely, on subsiding coasts, sea level is rising more rapidly than can be accounted for by climate related SLR. In many of these cases, human activities are leading to increased subsidence, particularly on river deltas such as the GangesBrahmaputra, Mekong, and Changjiang deltas where urban water and sediment control affect the deposit of sediment (Nicholls and Cazenave 2010; Church et al. 2013; Cutter 2006). A stark visual image of this subsidence can be found south of Bangkok where the shoreline has retreated more than a kilometer and telephone poles can be seen standing in the sea (Nicholls and Cazenave 2010). Some of the strongest subsidence effects and increases in relative SLR have resulted from urban water withdrawal from groundwater sources. In the 20th century alone, costs of this urban water use have been immense. In fact, with increased coastal urbanization calling for ever larger diversion of water from groundwater sources, land subsidence has approached 5 m in Tokyo, 3 m in Shanghai, and 2 m in Bangkok. Increased flood threats alone in these coastal cities have necessitated heightened flood 16
defenses and heavier investment in drainage infrastructure (Nicholls et al. 1999; Nicholls and Cazenave 2010). Sea level rise interacts with and potentially exacerbates ongoing environmental change and environmental pressures in cities. In areas such as the Gulf Coast of the United States, for example, land subsidence is expected to add to apparent sea level rise. New York City will see an acceleration in the inundation of coastal wetlands that may lead to threats to vital infrastructure and water supplies that can affect public health. Impacts such as these have already been seen in the havoc wreaked by hurricane Sandy (see section 8.1). Erosional pressures can also be increased by reductions of natural protective features such as dunes and beaches, and impacts on beaches are likely to be exacerbated by rapidly increasing human population densities in the coastal zone and widespread transformation of coastlines to land uses associated with urban areas (Dugan et al. 2011). Thus, through the depletion of natural protective features, such urban transformations increase risks in coastal areas, as ecosystems are depleted that would otherwise lessen the probability and the severity of climactic events. For example, soils store large amounts of water, facilitate transfer of surface water to groundwater, and prevent or reduce flooding, and natural buffers, such as dunes, beaches and wetlands, reduce hazards by absorbing surface water and decreasing wave energy and storm surges (Uy et al. 2012). The effects of urban degradation of coastal ecosystems are particularly acute when they magnified by periodically occurring coastal storms such as cyclones.
4.7.3 Tropical Storm Frequency and Intensity Much debate has revolved around whether hurricane and cyclone activity will increase with increases in global temperature associated with climate change. It is unclear 17
whether sea surface temperatures increase the likelihood of development of cyclones, which gain their energy from warm ocean surface waters. While reviews of cyclone frequency have shown increased activity in the past two decades, much of this evidence has been recently refuted because satellites and other technological advances have improved our measuring and monitoring of these storms during the period when the increases were recorded (Church et al. 2013; Landsea et al. 2010). Investigations to determine whether and how the characteristics of tropical storms such as cyclones might be altered by climate change are ongoing, and there are open questions about long-term trends due to a lack of consistency, availability or quality of historical data (Church et al. 2013). Much of this inconsistency springs from the fact that there are large deviations in patterns of cyclonic frequency and intensity, making it difficult to determine long-term trends and whether any trends found can be attributed to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Therefore, whether recent changes in cyclone or hurricane activity have natural or human causes remains undetermined. Current models, however, consistently find that the average intensity of tropical cyclones will increase worldwide by 2 to 11% by 2100. Models also show decreases in the number of tropical cyclones, by 6 to 34% but with higher increases in the frequency of the most intense cyclones, and an approximately 20% higher precipitation rate within 100 km of the storm’s center. Large differences remain, however, in the findings on frequency, intensity and precipitation among the various studies based on the location and basin being modeled (Knutson et al. 2010). In its Forth Assessment Report (AR4), IPPC found an increasing tropical cyclone activity likely occurring in some regions but did not find an increasing trend in overall 18
annual numbers of cyclones; however, this finding has been downgraded in its more recent report. IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) asserts low confidence that that tropical storms will increase in frequency or intensity. While some studies have shown an increase in frequency and intensity, others have questioned this finding on the basis that changes in technical and observational ability during the period studied lead to a bias in the results. The thrust of this argument is that cyclones may have missed being observed during earlier historical periods due to less effective data collection and observational techniques (Landsea 2010; Landsea 2007). Likewise, in an attempt to refute increases in the intensity of coastal storms, Pielke et al.(1998, 2008) have attempted to look for changes in normalized property damage assessments over a range of years to determine whether damages from coastal storms are higher today than in previous historical periods. These studies compare damage estimates from a range of years (1925 to 1995 (Pielke and Landsea 1998) and 1900 to 2005 (Pielke et al. 2008). In both studies, data on US hurricane damages were normalized for storms in earlier eras by adjusting for inflation, population and wealth. The 20008 study added a methodology by considering the number of housing units in addition to population. Both studies found, when considering these normalized damages, that there were no discernable trends in the data; this implies that the intensity of hurricanes is not increasing and that the increased costs of damages brought by coastal storms are the direct result of higher levels of development along US coasts. The study finds that more people and property along the coasts have meant more loss of property, and these increased losses have been a result of this increased exposure - not stronger storms, higher storm surge or increases in precipitation. While these results bear out the assertion that social factors are an important consideration in the creation of coastal impacts, there are several assumptions that may 19
create a bias towards higher normalized costs in previous eras. First, wealth is measured at the US national level, and change in wealth is assumed to be the same within the coastal counties studied. It seems feasible that coastal counties were some of the wealthier parts of the nation through much of the early 1900, and that there may have been some leveling of this trend over time as the of construction of larger multi-family units brought the cost of individual housing units down in inflation adjusted dollars. Economies of scale may also be at play here, since more people and more multi-unit dwellings in coastal communities will lower the costs developers pay for materials and transportation. A change in construction standards and methods with innovations like drywall, power tools and offsite assembly, reducing the number of man-hours and skilled man-hours needed for construction, should be also considered in any inflation index for housing comparing 1900 to 2005 or dates between. These studies also do not take factors in social vulnerability into account. The lack of consideration of vulnerability factors is common in assets based approaches to disaster loss as was the case in many studies of Hurricane Sandy. There is currently almost a complete lack of scientific literature that compares social vulnerability indicators with the impacts of Hurricane Sandy (See 8.1 Hurricane Sandy). One reason for this is probably a lack of available data at a fine enough spatial scale to yield significant results. Other reasons are the many possible confounding variables and that fact that some of data may be available at some scales, such as the city scale or zip code level, but it is difficult to find all the required variables at the same scale. To use this data from different scales, it is often necessary to downscale data, which can lead to inaccuracy of results. It is clear, whether considering increases exposure or in adverse climatic events, that hazards are increasing in urbanized coastal 20
zones. Such hazards include storm surge and coastal flooding discussed in the next section.
4.7.4 Storm Surge and Coastal Flooding Of the periodic disasters confronting coastal urban areas, floods are one of the most devastating. When they occur, these events may overwhelm physical infrastructure, individual and social resilience. In cities such as Mumbai, Dhaka, Jakarta and Caracas, these threats occur more frequently. Others, such as New Orleans retain relative stability through long periods based on hard infrastructures and other coastal protections such as levees, dykes and pumps. Floods in cities with these protections happen less frequently, but when they happen they are caused by large storms overwhelming these systems (See section 6). When large storm events occur, including coastal storm surge or heavy precipitation, flooding is often exacerbated, due to the uncontrolled development of hard structures and surfaces over natural drainage channels (Wong et al. 2014). Storm surge or heavy precipitation creates large volumes of surface runoff that may overwhelm any built drainage systems, but many cities are without or have inadequate drainage systems. For instance, coastal cities as Mombasa and Shah Alam, have inadequate drainage systems overall (Rabbani 2007) and other cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai have drainage systems that do not cover all neighborhoods (de Sherbinin et al. 2007). Many cities in sub-Saharan Africa have very large deficits in drainage infrastructures along with a very limited investment capacity (Revi et al. 2014). In such cities, the effects of heightened runoff from storm surge or precipitation can threaten lives and livelihoods. Compounding the issue of insufficient drainage systems is another issue present in many countries of the developing world, inadequate solid waste management. Solid waste that is 21
inappropriately disposed of, often clogs the already inadequate drainage systems of these cities and can result in heightened flood risks (Romero-Lankao 2008). Floods may also be influenced by such factors as land-use practices in surrounding watersheds or land-use and drain maintenance within the city. Coastal urban areas will need to reduce the future occurrence of these risks in the face of climate change by building appropriate climate proof infrastructures (Revi et al. 2014; Romero-Lankao 2008) and through management and governance (Thompson and Gaviria 2004). All of these steps will be difficult in the developing world where economics and poor governance will be major obstacles (Romero-Lankao 2008; Sattherwaite 2007). Drainage infrastructures are often affected by floods and storm surge when they are needed most. Electrical switchgear and pump motors, are particularly at risk (see section 6). These threats to water systems may become more frequent with changes such as sea level rise bringing more intense storm surge events.
4.7.5 Water Systems and Ecosystem Services Water systems in coastal urban areas will be affected by sea level rise as coastal inundation and salt water intrusion affect surface and ground water sources. Precipitation changes will be regionally differentiated. For instance, tropical areas are likely to see a warmer-get-wetter phenomenon with predicted increases in seasonal precipitation following patterns of SST, but changes in mean annual precipitation are less certain. Decreases by up to 29% by 2100 are predicted for the Caribbean, and up to 20 percent in both southern Africa and southern Europe. Predictions for South America are greatly variable, while areas in North America mostly have predicted increases in precipitation (Church et al. 2013). These changes in precipitation may have dire consequences for coastal cities in 22
terms of both water resources and systems. Areas that will become dryer will need to determine means of providing continued water supply at current levels adjusted for population growth or implement strong conservation measures without overreliance on ground water sources and aquafers that can lead to subsidence. However, a greater diversion of ecosystem services including both extraction from groundwater sources and diverting water from further afar will probably become necessary under additional stress, brought on by drier conditions. With implications for both the availability of water resources and for ecosystem impacts, mean precipitation has tended to decrease annually in arid and semi-arid regions such as northern Chile, northeast Brazil, northern Mexico, west Africa and Ethiopia, the drier parts of southern Africa, and western China (RomeroLankao 2008; Wilbanks et al. 2007). A continuation of this trend can create severe water resource limitations to further stress already overburdened ecosystem services, thus potentially expanding the ecological footprint of cities by putting pressure on them to expropriate carrying capacity from “distant elsewheres” (Rees 1992). Yet it is also likely that together with reduced annual average rainfall, greater extremes in individual rainfall events will mean that flood hazard in these regions will increase, compounding the effects of sea level rise in coastal cities (Revi et al. 2014). Lower levels of precipitation will constrain the availability of freshwater sources for coastal urban centers through the reduction and accelerated depletion of nearby sources and through salt-water intrusion reducing the quality of groundwater (Wong et al. 2014). These issues will be especially hard to respond to for growing cities and large cities that currently have insufficient sources of freshwater (Romero-Lankao 2008). For instance, urban areas along the highly developed Yucatan Peninsula in the Mexican Caribbean, in south, east and Southeast Asia, and in coastal areas in Africa (Parry et al. 23
2007; Satterthwaite et al. 2007). Independent of increasing climate change stresses, these areas are already experiencing water scarcity or water stress issues, which tend to effect poorer populations first (Romero-Lankao et al. 2008; Satterthwaite et al. 2007). Coastal urban water supplies and sanitation systems can be affected by climate variability and change in diverse ways (Revi et al 2014; Wilbanks et al. 2007). However, what is certain is that whatever is in store for these areas, ether drier or wetter conditions, water systems will be put at risk (Revi et al. 2014) and these changes will require cities to expand their ecological footprints or find means to reduce their demands on local carrying capacity (Rees 1992).
4.7.6 Increasing Risks in Urbanized Coastal Zones Through combined social and physical pressures, urbanized coastal zones are being increasingly exposed to risks, and such risks are often conditioned by coastal erosion as and subsidence as they converge with rising seas. These effects are being be driven, largely in many cases, by human activity along coasts (Parry et al. 2007). Sea level rise risks will be compounded by the continued growth of economic activities and populations in the LECZ (McGranahan, et al. 2007, Nicholls et al. 2007). Urban settlements in Caribbean areas are often within the LECZ, along with other areas like the low-lying northeast coast of South America, from northeast Brazil to Venezuela, where between 20 and 50% of the population resides within the LECZ. Areas within the LECZ, will be particularly challenged by growing levels of risk with increasing SLR. Storm surges, inundation and flooding, salt-water intrusion, loss of drinking water sources, increased coastal erosion and reductions in livable land space will be particularly acute within the LECZ. However, attempts to relocate populations will create potential for other issues, such as overcrowding and ecosystem degradation in higher elevation 24
coastal regions. Other climate related changes, such as increases in the duration and intensity of coastal storms, can result in acute and extreme hazards brought on by extreme sea level events. While the science is not yet clear on whether increases in frequency or intensity of cyclones will be caused by warming seas, it is likely that specific regions, such as the North Atlantic and the Arabian Sea, will experience more intense storms and heavier precipitation (Church et al. 2014). In any event, impacts, such as coastal storm surge and flooding, will likely occur with more frequency and intensity as climate change creates the potential for more compound impacts. For instance, intense storms such as cyclones will compound local SLR and create extreme SLR and coastal flooding through storm surge. Increases in extreme SLR and extreme SLR events will occur with higher frequency and intensity, a phenomenon that will primary threaten coastal areas, particularly the LECZ. Table 2: Coastal Vs Overall Population, Land Percentages and Densities by Continent System
Africa
Asia
Latin Oceania America
Europe
North World America
Coastal
71.5
56.7
82.1
89.2
83.7
90.4
64.9
Overall
38.4
37.5
67.9
70.8
70.9
81.5
46.7
5.4
13.0
8.8
3.3
11.6
11.6
10.2
0.8
3.5
2.6
0.6
3.9
4.7
2.8
Coastal
2,123
1,934
789
610
640
497
1,119
Overall
1,278
1,272
656
427
588
289
770
Coastal
56.1
69.6
54.9
67.7
50.9
79.0
65.3
Overall
45.9
50.6
49.3
57.4
44.5
61.5
49.8
Description Share of population that resides in urban areas (%)
Urban land as share Coastal of total land (%) Overall Urban population density (persons per square km) Share of urban dwellers in cities over 1 million (%)
From McGranahan et al. 2005 with modifications by author 25
Even without the projected effects of extreme SLR, however, increases in sea level may inundate the LECZ and submerge many small island nations. Particularly at risk are coastal areas in Asia and India. Many settlements in the LECZ are already in some of the most economically challenged and least developed areas and lack critical infrastructures such as storm sewers, paved roads and flood resistant buildings. The lack of the basic assets, infrastructures options, governmental supports and services needed to resist and rebound from disaster can be termed and adaptation deficit (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2011; Romero-Lankao 2008). Coastal urban areas with adaptation deficits among segments of their populations will be acutely at risk from the effects of climate change. The impacts of sea level rise are compounded by the fact that economic activities and populations continue to move to urbanized coastal zones including those in the LECZ (McGranahan, et al. 2007, Nicholls et al. 2007). As of 2004, coastal zones worldwide were about 65% urbanized (see Table 1) with many, like those on mega-deltas such as the Ganges Brahmaputra in India and the Nile in Africa, associated with significant and expanding urban areas (Nicholls et al. 2007). Highly urbanized coasts in Southeast Asia, India, the Caribbean and Central America (Cancun, Santo Domingo, and Tegucigalpa) are at risk from the combined effects of sea level rise and extreme storms. On the eastern coast of the Indian subcontinent, where cyclone activity is about five times that found on the Arabian Sea (Romero-Lankao 2008), coastal urban areas will likely see larger impacts due to sea level rise in a region where past cyclones have had devastating impacts. For example, in 1999, with a mixture of high winds, strong storm surge and coastal flooding, Cyclone Orissa,
devastated buildings, knocked out critical health and safety supporting infrastructure and economic assets and killed over 10,000 people across 10 coastal districts, including a number of urban areas (Satterthwaite et al. 2007). In a future with higher seas, storms of such magnitude could compound the effects of sea level rise and create greater damages. As the impacts of climate change, poor building conditions, and poor or inadequate infrastructure for sanitation and waste treatment coalesce in cities such as Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Shanghai, heightened impacts on life, livelihoods and economic activities will follow (de Sherbinin et al. 2007). Hazards such as sea level rise exhibit differential impacts, both across and within urban areas. Local environmental and social conditions, such as location in risk-prone and areas, and access to economic assets, social safety nets, drainage and protective structures are important in determining the underlying vulnerabilities of a local communities and populations. In coastal cities of developing countries, these differentials are often stark. In the slums of Mumbai, for instance, even without any consideration of sea level rise, many areas have been recurrently flooded because they are located in lowlying coastal areas or along riverbanks, and these communities typically do not have adequate drainage (de Sherbinin et al. 2007). The expectation of sea level rise puts them at even higher risk. As early as 1990, IPCC’s First Assessment Report (Tysban et al. 1990) recognized the danger of human life and land loss presented by sea level rise. However, the results of existing disasters, which followed lines of vulnerability driven by socioeconomic factors, soon made it clear that climate change impacts would not be distributed equally among local disaster areas and their populations, even given similar
27
geographies and biophysical hazards. Vulnerability was also determined by the ability of individuals, populations and societies to respond to climate change.
4.7.7 Interacting Drivers of Risk in UCZs In the presence of high levels of risk, urban settlements with long histories of investment in housing, urban infrastructure and services or with good access to insurance (such as those in many high-income countries), or those with multilevel disaster response plans, such as that of Cuba (Thompson and Gaviria 2004), are more able to cope with risks. Yet, even coastal urban areas in high-income countries, where buildings and infrastructure are often built to withstand extreme and less frequent weather events, such 100-year floods, buildings and infrastructure, particularly in low-lying coastal zones, can be overwhelmed by the increased intensity of storm surge (Buckley and Broto 2011), and storm surge will be greatly compounded by sea level rise (Wolf et al. 2014). For coastal urban centers facing adaptation deficits, such as a lack of provision of drainage, paved roads and warning systems, risks will be further compounded. The populations and infrastructures of urban settlements that already show adaptive deficits within the current range of climate variability will be put at heightened risk as climate change adds such compounding factors as sea level rise and increased intensity of precipitation. The risks and opportunities facing coastal urban centers as a result of climate change are not solely created by the biophysical hazards being brought on by a warming planet, but also by interactions between, multiple human and environmental systems, where human systems consume natural services and offload wastes to the environment, either locally or at a distance (Rees 1992). Therefore, impacts and opportunities brought by environmental change need to be considered in the context of multiple interacting
28
human and natural systems. Such variables, on the human side, as lack of assets, population density, poor or inadequate infrastructure, economic inequity or social tensions can cause significant additional stress and compound disruptive events and impacts, often most strongly affecting disenfranchised populations in informal settlements. Many of these areas become home to workers like the Chinese laborers who leave their rural districts to fulfil a need for low-wage labor in Coastal Chinese cities (see section 5.3). These migrants often come from the very areas from which cities are expropriating carrying capacity by diverting ecosystem services such as water or intensive agricultural land use to meet urban needs (Rees 1992). Local urban jurisdictions that have inadequate governance structures have trouble meeting the needs of their growing populations even without additional stressors from climate change (Sattherwaite 2007). Patterns of governance breakdown such as institutional and jurisdictional fragmentation, inadequate revenue to match areas of responsibility (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2013), and fixed and inflexible patterns of land use are highly variable within and across cities. This variability also drives differential impacts.
5.0
Vulnerability, Capacity and Resilience in the UCZ The 5th assessment report of the IPCC (AR5) draws many conclusions relevant to
the understanding of the relationships between coastal urban centers and climate change Key among its findings is an unequivocal statement that the Earth’s climate is warming based on anthropogenic forcing (See Box 1). Coastal cities, as some of the most highly populated cities on Earth, have played a key role in this process as since the beginning of industrialization. Urban sources have been primary drivers of increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane in the
29
Earth’s atmosphere. As such, coastal cities have been key drivers of their own accumulating risks. Risks combine biophysical and social conditions and are being heightened by climate change on the biophysical side and by vulnerability on the social side. Increasing biophysical hazards, which will interface with social factors to increase risk, are evident from observations of phenomena such as increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of sea ice and arctic ice sheets and rising sea surface temperature (SST) and global mean sea level. While questions have arisen regarding increases in the frequency and severity of cyclones and droughts due to large variability and changes in the accuracy of recording techniques, changes in precipitation and other weather extremes are still regarded as highly likely in IPCC AR5 (See Table 2 and Box 1). Table 3: Key findings of AR5 WGII on Coastal Systems and Their Potential Impacts on Coastal Urban Areas (Wong et al. 2014) Potential Impacts added by author
Finding
Potential Impact
Coastal systems are particularly sensitive to three key drivers related to climate change: sea level, ocean temperature, and ocean acidity (very high confidence)
These interacting drivers can affect ecosystem protections such as coral reefs, wetlands and sea grass beds, heightening the effects of storm surge, coastal inundation, and salt water intrusion
Coastal systems and low-lying areas will increasingly experience adverse impacts such as submergence, coastal flooding, and coastal erosion due to relative sea level rise (RSLR; very high confidence)
Disruption of settlements, commerce, transport and industry due to flooding; pressure on or damage to or loss of infrastructures; property damage or loss; disruption of public water supply
The population and assets exposed to coastal risks as well as human pressures on coastal ecosystems will increase significantly in the coming decades due to population growth, economic development, and urbanization (high confidence)
Property loss or damage Withdrawal of risk coverage in vulnerable areas by private insurer (at least in high income countries) Potentials for population migration
30
For the 21st century, the benefits of protecting against increased coastal flooding and land loss due to submergence and erosion at the global scale are larger than the social and economic costs of inaction (limited evidence, high agreement)
Costs of coastal protection and adaptation versus costs of land-use relocation; all have costs that must be absorbed by society
The relative costs of adaptation vary strongly between and within regions and countries for the 21st century (high confidence)
Additional stress on already overburdened developing countries, often with poor governmental structures and a lack of assets and options
The analysis and implementation of coastal adaptation toward climateresilient and sustainable coasts has progressed more significantly in developed countries than in developing countries (high confidence)
Without rapid movement toward adaptation in developing countries, potential impacts are much higher in developing than in developed countries
5.1
Concepts of Vulnerability Scholars began to explore a vulnerability concept in the 1970s when they began to
question the ‘naturalness’ of ‘natural disaster’ (Wisner et al. 2004). They continued development of a social approach to disaster vulnerability by rejecting the assumption that disasters are caused by external natural events alone, and rethinking disaster causality and normality. Blaikie et al. (1994) proposed an approach to vulnerability that takes into account the social (political and economic) environment of disasters. They developed a Pressure and Release (PAR) model, to examine how unsafe conditions develop due to dynamic pressures such as urbanization and environmental degradation that are a function of political and economic systems. These efforts were aimed at defining vulnerability in ways that integrate social, economic, and environmental factors and have used case studies to validate their approaches.
31
The PAR model posits that a disaster involves the coming together of two opposing forces in a particular place and time. Disasters occur when hazards come upon social systems that are generating unsafe conditions. They use the analogy of a nutcracker to convey the idea that pressure comes from both the vulnerability of a population and the severity of the hazards’ impact (Wisner et al. 2004; Blaikie et al. 1994). Fussel (2007) proposed that concepts of vulnerability can be divided into internal and external spheres and biophysical and socioeconomic knowledge domains. The internal sphere represents vulnerability conditioning factors that are close at hand or local, such as household income, local support networks and local access to information in the socio-economic domain or local environmental conditions and landscape characteristics in the biophysical domain. The external sphere, on the other hand, represents factors affecting vulnerability that are wider reaching, such as national policies and international aid in the socio-economic domain or regional climatic conditions and storm systems, etc. in the biophysical domain. Integrated vulnerability assessments, asserts Fussel (2007) would consider factors from both spheres and both domains. Vulnerability to climate change impacts can be defined as a function of risks, exposure and sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, where exposure is the chance that individuals or populations will be impacted by climate change risk and sensitivity is the susceptibility of individuals or populations to risk. An individual, household or population is vulnerable to the risks associated with climate change if these risks may result them being pushed below a threshold level of well-being (Heltberg and BonshOsmelovskiy, 2011).
32
The focus on the universal often comes at the cost of the specific. This is the dilemma of vulnerability research and many areas of specificity are left to explore which will likely lead to adjustments of the current theoretical approaches. This shift is already underway, as, pressed by the need to explain specific local conditions, some scholars are looking for integrated approaches. Romero-Lankao and Qin (2011) see the current state of vulnerability theory as being somewhat scattered based on multiple viewpoints, each with a value for understanding the whole but none presenting the entire picture. They define urban vulnerability to environmental change as a complex and dynamic whole comprised of multiple dimensions and their interactions. Urban vulnerability, or the potential for people in urban areas to be negatively impacted by climate change, is a function of: a) hazards, (i.e., the threat(s) to a system of adverse physical events); b) exposure, i.e., the extent to which urban populations are unprotected from or subject to hazards; c) sensitivity, i.e., the degree to which, given certain demographic characteristics or medical conditions, urban populations are susceptible to the potential adverse physical events implied by hazards; and d) adaptive capacity, or a series of resources, assets and options people draw on to moderate potential damages, to cope with the consequences, or to introduce policy changes to expand the range of variability with which they can cope. Just as a hazard is a potential and different from an actual adverse event, adaptive capacity is potential and different from actual coping and adaptation actions which take place in response to events.
33
Yet studies of local areas have focused only on relatively few examples of responses to natural disasters, and few studies have managed to bridge the gap between the specifics of multiple urban areas and general theories of vulnerability.
5.2
Towards a Unified Framework Using a framework comprised of the concept of convergence between
vulnerabilities and hazards contained, exemplified by the Pressure and Release (PAR) and Access models (Wisner et al. 2004; Blaikie et al. 1994), in combination with livelihoods and human ecosystem interaction approaches, can help examine concepts of urban vulnerability as they apply to urban areas in coastal zones and to examine the ways in which the natural physical events of climate change in the coastal zones will interact with human dimensions to create local climate change impacts. An integrated framework such as this may help predict the impacts in urban coastal areas as climate change progresses, the nature of these impacts, and what forces are at play that can increase or lessen their effects on inhabitants of these cities (Adelekan, 2009; McGranahan et al. 2007; Nichols et al. 2008; Nichols et al. 2010). The PAR and Access models create frameworks for looking at disasters as the result of the intersection of two opposing forces. In the PAR model the forces generating vulnerability are on one side; on the other side are natural hazards or slowly unfolding natural processes that create a dangerous set of conditions (hazards). The two forces may be visualized as being like a nutcracker that creates the impact or disaster where the forces intersect. The access model picks up where PAR leaves off and attempts to bridge a gap in a false dichotomy, which might be assumed if one limited analysis to the PAR model,
34
between natural hazards and macro-level social causes of disasters. The focus of the access model is on how the availability of assets and options at a micro-level (household or livelihood) sets up the conditions for a natural hazard to express itself as a disaster. Here nature itself can be incorporated since the distribution of natural resources is part of the function of the social system (Wisner et al. 2004; Blaikie et al. 1994). In many models of the interaction between hazards and vulnerably, the effects of environmental hazards are mediated by socio-economic and politico-institutional factors impacting vulnerability. Most of these have focused on the vulnerability side of the equation with the idea that development of institutional supports to development, adaptation and disaster planning is the most certain way to lessen the impacts of disasters. More recently, scholars have begun to try to piece together a coherent picture of what causes breakdowns in institutional capacity and hence the ability to provide institutional support to improve the capacity to respond to environmental hazards. The PAR and Access models can help explain why people that take different positions within the social system might be affected differently by the same natural hazards. Wisner et al.(2004) looked at the effects of social systems on people (large social forces) as they intersect with the forces of nature (PAR model) and then take a more focused view of the local forces in play that create access to options and resources (Access model) to create response capacity. They put less focus on the effects of people on nature and how that relationship in turn creates a feedback loop that may amplify the natural forces or on how the very act of creating access to resources and natural services through human social systems affects those natural systems which, in turn, affect vulnerable people and become disasters. People with the ability to access resources might
35
be said to have greater adaptive capacity to lower their sensitivity (Luers 2005). That being said, there may be thresholds at which risk is spread over wider populations (Romero-Lankao et al. 2013; Eiken and Luers 2006; Luers 2005; Beck 1992). These thresholds are levels of environmental change beyond which actions to mitigate or adapt to climate change will no longer be tenable. To describe these thresholds, I follow Holling et al. (2002a) in attempting to describe a dynamic interplay between environmental hazards and human systems that creates panarchies, or nested adaptive cycles. It is precisely within this interplay that the thresholds are bound and beyond which actions will begin to lose effectiveness. Furthermore, adaptation is occurring at interacting scales with smaller, faster moving systems in continuous interaction with larger slower moving systems. These system interactions can be seen in and between ecosystems and human systems (Holling et al. 2002a). A systems theory of resilience looks at the ability of these systems to absorb shocks and stresses and to retain their essential functions or to move to another state (phase shift) in response to these stresses. Some social scientists (Romero-Lankao and Dodman 2011) have seen such shifts as a potential to bounce-forward, assuming a more desirable state is achieved. However, it is equally plausible that a shift might be perceived to be negative, such as a shift towards a more authoritarian form of government, as environmental stresses trigger multiple social problems and attempts are made by a government to stem a tide of social unrest. Another example can be found in the interactions between human systems and coral reef ecosystems, as human impacts from land use changes, pollution, warming oceans and ocean acidification and predator removal create compound effects that threaten coral communities. Under these conditions
36
a phase shift can be seen to algal dominance with subsequent effects on community species ratios and dynamics (Gunderson 2010; Holling and Gunderson 2002a; Smith and Buddemeier 1992). Figure 2 represents the coming together of hazards and vulnerability to create an impact. This representation resembles PAR model of Blaikie et al (1994) as the two forces converge; however, the PAR model sees the forces coming together resembling a containment with two sides coming together to create pressure in the center, described by Wisner et al. (2004) as like a nutcracker. I have modified this idea so that as the two sides come together, they converge on a line of coincidence, which is a convergence in time at a particular place, where the potential for impact carried by a hazard comes together with the potential for impact carried by vulnerability, creating a larger potential for impact. In this idealized diagram, vulnerability and hazards are equal. In this conception, I have also added a threshold, which is a level at which the impact potential becomes so high that an impact is unavoidable.
Figure 2 represents the coming together of hazards and vulnerability (represented by two right triangles) to create an impact at the apex of an isosceles triangle. As the two forces converge they meet on a line of coincidence at a particular time and place. The potential for impact carried by a hazard comes together with the potential for impact carried by vulnerability creating an increased potential for impact. 37
Another way of conceptualizing this convergence of triangles is that hazards and vulnerability come together like superimposed triangular waves (figure 3), where the crest of the wave may reach a threshold level and create an impact through the superimposition of two smaller waves. The magnitudes of the interacting waves would therefore give their relative additive values. I have idealized the additive properties of the two sides (in this case there is a doubling of the impact potential). However, it is easy to imagine the convergence of different sized waves. Where vulnerability is larger, it will predominate in the amount it adds to the potential for impact. Thus, a higher vulnerability would require a smaller hazard to create an impact and vice versa. This is not a mathematical model and should not be treated as such. It functions here merely as a conceptual model of the convergence of hazards with vulnerabilities. Any attempt to quantify such a model would be wrought with its own set of difficulties. For instance, wave convergence involves the coming together of like wave types and the physics and mathematics of fluid dynamics. Are there social and physical hazard potentials with some like quantity that could be quantified and combined in a model using wave theory? The answer to this question is beyond the scope of this paper. The point of this model, however, is to conceptually simplify a complex coming together of potentials and thresholds. The quantification of such a model would necessitate designing comparable indices that can predict and quantify these damage potentials and thresholds in like terms that could then be used to predict their combined effects. A more adequate model would probably need to be in four dimensions to account for space and time and the convergence of multiple compounding elements. Within the literature, a convergence in space and time is a common element in many models, but the model proposed here brings
38
in the idea of a space-time convergence of multiple elements that creates an unavoidable impact once a threshold is reached. Also new here, is that this complex combination and compounding behavior of multiple elements might be modeled using wave theory.
Figure 3 represents the coming together of hazards and vulnerability as superimposed triangular waves, where the crest of the wave may reach a threshold level and create an impact through its superimposition with another wave. The magnitudes of the interacting waves would therefore give their relative additive values.
The development of such models is an area for further research. It can be assumed, however, that such models would be highly complex, multi-dimensional, and may be less useful as visualization or conceptual tools. This is not to say that mathematical models of this convergence have not been suggested. One such attempt has been put forward by Luers (2005) who conceptualized vulnerability as the z-axis of a three-dimensional shape with x and y-axes being sensitivity/exposure and threshold of damage/state, respectively. Here threshold is viewed as a quality of the socio-ecological system beyond which it is impossible for the 39
system to bounce back and avoid moving to another, possibly less desirable state. In this framework, vulnerability is a vector the can project a point on a 3 dimensional surface, similar to a topographic map with vulnerability contour lines (figure 4), where lower thresholds converging with higher exposure create higher vulnerability. While this approach is valuable, one of its chief limitations is the fact that it plots, in a static threedimensional view, single stressors as they affect single indictors of state and not more complex multiple stressors and interactions. Complex system and particularly socioecological systems such as cities are often undergoing and responding to exposure to multiple stressors simultaneously and with differential levels of success. This leaves the problem of quantification of thresholds, exposure and sensitivity in more complex systems as an open question for which science has yet to find adequate answers.
Figure 4: In this conceptual model from Luers (2005), vulnerability is the z-axis of a threedimensional shape with x and y-axes being sensitivity/exposure and threshold of damage/state respectively. Vulnerability is, therefore, a vector that can project a point on a 2 dimensional surface similar to a topographic map with vulnerability contours where lower thresholds converging with higher exposure create higher vulnerability.
40
Cutter and Enrich (2006) proposed a conceptual framework that helps explain the contextual articulation of the place vulnerability (figure 5). One can see here, under exposure to hazard potential, that there is an interplay between geographic and sociospatial contexts, which play out in biophysical and social vulnerability and converge to create place vulnerability. The convergent nature of biophysical hazards with social vulnerability is common to many such frameworks including the one I proposed above. One can also see that, dependent on something unstated in Cutter’s framework, there is feedback to mitigation or risk. The feedback is response to place vulnerability and responses can improve mitigation potentials but may also heighten risks. These feedback loops are an interaction between human systems such as urban areas and the ecosystems and other natural systems that they depend upon. The interaction creates a combined natural human system (CNH).
Figure 5: In this conceptual framework from Cutter and Enrich (2006) based on Cutter 1996, under exposure to hazard potential, there is an interplay between geographic and socio-spatial contexts, which play out in biophysical and social vulnerability and converge to create place vulnerability.
41
The work of Holling et al. (2002a) on coupled human and natural systems points the way to how these systems interact as sets of nested adaptive cycles (panarchies) interacting across scales of time and space. Though the term panarchy may be somewhat misleading, since it brings to mind a combination of the prefix pan, meaning all or worldwide, with the word anarchy, meaning chaos or lack of government. Actually, it was intended to combine the word Pan, Greek god of nature to convey a creative and destabilizing force, with the word hierarchy to convey the structure and order in organization and interaction of these systems. The concept of panarchies was intended to get away from the idea of the hierarchies of these nested systems as ridged top-down structures and to convey the idea of a dynamic and evolutionary interaction between them. I will discuss panarchies in more detail when I delve more deeply into the feedback between human and natural systems as the interactions adaptive cycles across scales of time and space. My emphasis on access and vulnerability should not be taken to mean that people with full access to all of the resources the system has to offer cannot be vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. For instance, wealthy people who own coastal properties will be vulnerable to a higher frequency and intensity of coastal flooding (O’Brien and Leichenko 2000), and the very fact that coastal areas have seen growth in assets and development will mean a greater loss of assets resulting from extreme coastal events (Pielke et al. 1998; Pielke et al. 2008). It has been estimated recently that 3% of the US population lives in areas subject to a 1 % risk of annual coastal flooding also known as 100-year flood zones (Crowell 2010; Zhang 2011). Between 1980 and 2003 there was a 28% increase in Americans who call coastal counties home. By 2003, that amounted to
42
150 million or 53% of all Americans (Cutter and Emrich 2006). This, of course includes areas that outside of the 100-yesr flood zone. As coastal populations continue to increase as climate change progresses, the future will bring heightened coastal flooding impacts (Nicholls et al. 2008). Even in wealthy countries, however, those with lower levels of access to resources face greater risks. During Hurricane Katrina, for instance, both race and class played a role in outcomes such as the speed of evacuation and the retention of employment (livelihood) for survivors (Elliott and Pais 2006). While one study found mortality rates to be independent of race (Jonkman et al. 2009), its methods of data aggregation almost certainly created bias in the study, and other studies have found outcomes were difficult to attribute to bias but that subtle forms rather than blatant forms of bias may have played into these outcomes (Henkel et al. 2006). Changes in the frequency and duration of climatic events being brought on by climate change are a prime example of human outputs to the environment creating a feedback loop to affect human well-being on a relatively short timescale. There is a growing gulf between how we think about how we act on the environment and our actual effects on the environment and ourselves (Beck 2002). The framework proposed by this paper will attempt to link the human effects on nature into the access model to look at anthropogenic changes as they are predicted to affect coastal human settlements. There are currently efforts underway to understand this feedback cycle in terms of the human relationship with nature and to create paradigm shifts within legal frameworks. The Andean concept of Buen Vivir has been established as a part of the constitutions of Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia. Within a constructional framework, Buen Vivir, or living well, protects the rights of nature from over exploitation and attempts to
43
create a harmony between humans and nature (Gloppen and St. Clair 2012; Fatheuer 2011). This movement by Latin American countries was a response to the excesses of neoliberal reforms and attempts to integrate indigenous philosophies into the state’s legal framework. Neoliberal ideology posits a radical commodification of the natural world where other values - social, cultural, or environmental - are negated in favor of monetary values (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2014). In the neoliberal conception, nature is not viewed as an unassailable constant, but rather as a fluid constraint that can be technologically influenced (Pellizzoni 2011). The livelihoods approach puts people (within households and communities) at the starting point of analysis of sustainable development and vulnerability (Sanderson 2000). A livelihood, or a means of assuring life, is sought by an individual or the members of a household based on their capabilities, actions and activities within a set of natural and social assets (Sanderson 2000; Chambers and Conway 1992). A livelihood can be said to be sustainable when it can cope with, or absorb impacts and stresses, maintain or enhance its options and capabilities and avoid depletion of its natural resource base (Brocklesby and Fischer 2003; Sanderson 2000; Chambers and Conmay 1992). Springing out of a tradition of studies that examine rural development, the livelihoods approach assumes a cohesive structural and strategic unit at the household level and rarely looks at the dynamics of the interactions between individuals within households (Moser 2008; Wisner et al. 2004). The livelihoods approach also acknowledges the multidimensional nature of vulnerability – the fact that certain demographic groups are particularly vulnerable to hazards not only as a result of age or existing health conditions, but also because of
44
individual/household assets (e.g., income, health services, and education). These assets are usually measured through indicators of capital (Moser 2008). At the conceptual level, this paper acknowledges the interactions of individual actors within and between households as an important dimension affecting urban vulnerability. Households could not exist without their individual members, and decisions regarding survival strategies are undertaken at the individual and not the household level (Rakodi 2002). Within the beginnings of a framework sketched out by this paper, therefore, individuals become one of the smallest unit of division of combined human natural (CHN) systems. Individual perceptions of climate change risk may also affect resilience, but these perceptions have been tied to proximity to climate change hazards. In this regard, people living in coastal areas may be most likely to feel that climate hazards pose an immediate threat and be willing to act to assure their safety (Brody et al. 2008). However, the cultural/psychological schema of the individual may also impact the ability to respond (Grothmann and Patt 2005), and individuals who feel that they can affect the outcome of climate change are more likely to act (Brody et al. 2008). This emphasizes how education and enfranchisement of the individual within the political power structure may be key determinants of response capacity. Except in cases of total state support or other forms of dependency (e.g., incarceration, childhood or inheritance) each person’s survival depends upon his or her pursuit of a means of livelihood, i.e., pursuit of the basic things that one needs to sustain life within the opportunities, constraints and obstacles that affect this pursuit. This pattern of life seeking opportunity within the constraints of the physical universe can be seen as
45
operating throughout natural and human systems (Holling 2002b). In the human realm, these opportunities and constraints are presented within the household, community, cultural, historical, political, and economic contexts affecting the individual’s sphere of action. The range of unique expressions of local systems follows this logic of development and begins as interactions between individuals pursuing livelihoods, with many of these interactions including cooperation and exclusion that in turn create and effect the larger systems and spheres of action and interaction, such as the family, cultural, economic and political spheres at local, regional and national levels. For cities these spheres might be seen on the neighborhood, towns, counties and metropolitan areas and these nested spheres have been described by Gunderson (2010) as “similar to the nesting of ecological structures such as patches, stands, forests and biomes.” Once created, however, these larger spheres become dominant forces affecting individual’s livelihood pursuits and will create supports or obstacles to individual, family and local and community resilience. These effects often take the form of path dependencies, as larger units of organization create the possibility for larger capital investments, which encourage flows along pre-existing tracks that are reinforced by the size of the investment that would be needed to change the path, and political imperatives giving immediate and short term issues higher priority. Concepts of vulnerability and resilience can, therefore, be most meaningful at the local level where they affect individuals in this pursuit of their livelihoods, but to be understood fully, also need to be seen in context of the larger political and economic and biophysical spheres that affect individual and local realities. This is not, however, the
46
way most vulnerability assessments currently operate. On the contrary, most are based on general notions of vulnerability and make use of international and national assessments (Biesbroek et al. 2010) and many find no connection at all to actual local conditions. Still less, however, do these approaches find explicit connections to ecosystems. The interaction of human systems and the ecosystems on which their continued existence depends, create feedback loops that affect both human and natural systems. The larger feedback from natural to human systems may create hazards and the conditions for human risk, often referred to in the literature as the possibility of loss, injury and other impacts (Parry et al. 2007). Ecosystems features such as coral reefs, sand dunes and coastal vegetation also provide valuable protective roles in coastal areas (Renaud et al. 2013) and their depletion or over exploitation leads to increases of the magnitudes of coastal impacts. These increases in magnitude can be seen as one of the primary mechanisms of the feedback loop between human and natural systems that may express itself as a disaster. Hazards are threatening or probable disturbances or stresses to which urban areas or their populations are exposed (Romero-Lankao et al. 2013; Wisner et al. 2004). Urban risk has been defined as an interaction between exposure to hazards and vulnerability and a lack of capacity to perceive and respond to these hazards. Distribution of the assets and options necessary for response capacity are often played out along the lines of formality and informality.
5.3
Formality and Informality Distinctions between formality and informality have been analyzed primarily
within the urban planning, economic production and development domains. Much of the analysis revolves around two schools of thought, with one looking at employment and
47
productivity and the other looking at legal and social protections. The productivity school sees the informal sector as comprised of occupations that are unskilled, outside of the formal market and marginalized, while the legalist school sees lack of legal and social protections in these occupations as the being key components that make them informal (Gasparini and Tornarolli 2009; Perry et al. 2007 ). In housing, for instance, informality is characterized by residential developments in extreme squalor or slums living without social protections or adequate services and infrastructures. While urban populations that fit this category are considered marginal by urban planners and policy makers, informality remains the dominant means of production in many cities of the developing world (Ejigu 2011). What is clear is that any discussion of informality versus formality creates a dichotomy between what is acceptable in society and what is not, what works within the legal/administrative structure and what is outside it. These arguments often tend to lose sight of the detail that the administrative/legal structure is an overlay to an underlying structure of natural physical laws, obstacles, constraints, risks and possibilities. As such, informality is an exception to the dominant urban culture represented by formal urban systems (Roy 2005). Outside of the formal structure created by human intuitions, attempts to create livelihood are termed informal. What is clear is that the informal sector accounts for a significant portion of the economies of most countries, from about 10% to 20% of GDP in developed countries and about 30% in developing countries to as high as 67% of GDP as it is in Bolivia (Chong and Gradstein 2004). There is a positive correlation between income inequality and informality that becomes even more pronounced when institutions are weaker (Chong and Gradstein 2004). This association between the strength of intuitions and informality can have two
48
possible mechanisms. First, institutions can offer social support systems and safety nets that allow individuals to earn livelihood in formal settings; secondly, zoning regulations and strong criminal and civil justice systems may create sufficient blocks on informal systems to create disincentives for people to use informal systems. However, this second use of formal structures as control systems may also create blocks to people entering the formal system. Such blocks may originate in the domain of government or private sector institutions or as an interaction between the two, but the end result of any of these mechanisms is to limit the options and possibilities available for some populations to earn a livelihood in the formal sector. Conversely, governmental and private enterprise structures can allow for some informal structures to meet the needs of formal systems.
Figure 6: A community water source in an informal settlement in a Beijing suburb, used by “farmer workers” who fulfill the need for cheap labor to fuel China’s economic boom.
For example, hukou, China’s system of household registration, provides social welfare benefits to Chinese residents based on their hukou, which is like a citizenship within a particular city, township or rural administrative jurisdiction. When Chinese citizens move outside of the area of their hukou to gain employment opportunities 49
elsewhere, they lose these benefits and become workers in an informal system that meets a need for cheap labor by the formal system. In Beijing, as well as in coastal cities such as Qinhuangdao and Tianjin, there are informal settlements of migrant, construction, factory and domestic workers who have come from rural districts all over China to participate in China’s economic boom. These workers earn low wages and have none of the social protections and infrastructural supports afforded by the urban-hukou system to state sanctioned urban residents (Wing Chan and Buckingham 2008; Liang and Zhongdong 2004; Informants in Beijing and Qinhuangdao 2014).
Figure 7: an informal market in Qinhuangdao, China.
The hukou system creates a two tier division between urban residents with legal status and access to social services and a growing migrant labor force with no access to social services and protections (Liang and Zhongdong 2004; Wing Chan and Buckingham 2008) At the same time, the hukou system has fueled China’s unprecedented economic expansion, and the percentage of urban residents in China without urban hukou status is growing (see figure 8). This growth is occurring at a faster pace in China’s coastal cities (Liang and Ma 2004). Based on increasing trade and market-driven movements, often supported by government policies, China’s coasts are attracting great 50
numbers of rural migrants, with a growth of about 17 million people between 1995 and 2000. This migration has created additional pressures in an already crowded and environmentally stressed coastal zone (Romero-Lankao 2008; McGranahan et al. 2007). Divisions between formality and informality also create a primary mechanism for the distribution of the goods and bads (negative feedbacks) of society. These distribution rules are enforced by structures of domination (Wisner et al. 2004).
Figure 8: The expansion of the use rural migrant labor in Chinese cities is evidenced in this comparison between urban overall (de facto) population and urban-hukuo population between 1958 and 2008. From: (Wing Chan and Buckingham 2008).
5.4
Formality and the Structures of Domination Human systems, such as urban areas, attempt to set up gates or controls through
which ecosystem services and environmental feedbacks are meted out to their populations. In the access model, Wisner et al. (2004) see these control gates mainly as social forces, referred to as social relations and structures of domination. However, the built environments of urban areas include hard infrastructures as distribution systems that may mirror these social relations (Adger and Kelly 1999). Thus, control valves and gates exist in social but also in a very real physical sense and distributions made through these
51
infrastructures often follow patterns of power relations, with sets of winners and losers created (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2014). These control gates also create path dependencies based on the political and economic capital expended to implement them or the economic and system destabilizing forces that will result from changing them. Since water lends itself to the idea of control valves or gates, this type of diversion of natural systems can be described by using an example of water resource appropriation and allocation, but may also be applied to the distribution of agricultural or building products, land allocation and use, provision of green space or protection from coastal flooding. A tendency of urban infrastructures is that their distribution of benefits is uneven across urban populations (Crawford 2011). Mexico City’s water system offers a prime example of how a re-engineering of the area’s natural hydrological system for the diversion and control of hydrological services has created the possibility for a city of 20 million to exist within a relatively small land area while creating a massive impact on its hinterlands and their ecosystems. The concept of ecological footprint speaks to the diversion of ecosystem services or alteration of natural systems to support urban areas (Rees et al. 1992). This concept has been focused on the hydrological cycle with the concept of hydrological footprint (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2014). Further elaborations of this concept could be made to include the process by which cities protect themselves from physical hazards such as storm surge and coastal inundation. It has been extensively documented that the degradation of ecosystems has negative impacts on people’s livelihoods, food security and water availability (Levy et al. 2005) and unequal access to power may play a significant role in determining livelihoods (Mustelin et al. 2010).
52
It is in the nature of urban areas that they must divert, replace or otherwise alter natural and ecosystem services, to support human populations that far surpass the natural carrying capacity of the land areas they inhabit. In doing so, they impact natural systems locally, but they also may affect remote natural systems and human systems alike (Rees 1992). Another way to think about this is that natural systems have natural path dependencies that humans circumvent with work (expending energy and creating environmental impacts). Carrying capacity is an outcome of natural path dependencies such as the amount of water that is naturally in an area (hydrological system state), the amount of food provided by the local ecosystem and the work required to overcome that capacity. Therefore, at least in part, the process of overcoming carrying capacity (a natural path dependency) may create path dependency in human systems. Large alterations of the physical environment surrounding cities, therefore, create a set of impacts on their surrounding ecosystems and these impacts also create a feedback loop that will affect the inhabitants of cities. These impacts, however, will not necessarily be felt by all inhabitants of a city equally. They are often distributed based on political power, race, and class through the use of large infrastructure and control gates. The concept of vulnerability or the degree to which urban populations are susceptible to and unable to cope with adverse effects of hazards, can be helpful in the analysis of spatially and socially differentiated impacts affecting the inhabitants of urban coastal zones. Furthermore, integration of the various conceptual approaches to urban vulnerability will be necessary to further advancing the field (Romero-Lankao and Qin 2011; Fussel 2007). These approaches can best be validated against a range of local conditions.
53
As in other areas, within urbanized coastal zones, the conditions of vulnerability and resilience, defined as the ability of a system to absorb a major stress or shock and return quickly to a normal state (Leichenko 2011) or even bounce-forward (RomeroLankao and Dodman 2011) are interdependent. There cannot be a full understanding of resilience, however, without integrative knowledge of the interactions between human and natural systems and how diversion or replacement of ecosystem services may become a source of spatially differentiated impacts and often wide-ranging environmental damage. These interactions are the source of many local livelihoods that are dependent on services from the local ecosystem (Salafsky and Wollenberg 2000), but they also form the basis for the way urban areas mete out life-sustaining ecosystem services (such as water resources and agricultural products) to their populations. Urban vulnerability has also been tied to access to a range of assets and options to respond to hazards of which access to diverted natural services plays a part. The diversion of these natural services creates feedback between human and natural systems that will play an increasingly strong role as climate change progresses in both the degradation of ecosystems and the social differentiation of environmental impacts. In urbanized coastal zones, these feedbacks will be expressed between natural and human systems such as natural hydrological systems and water diversions, ground water supplies and salt water intrusion, ecosystem and other natural services offering protection such as coral reefs, sand dunes, barrier islands, wetlands, river deltas, mangrove swamps, sea grass beds, estuaries and human engineered systems such as dams, levees, shore armoring and pumping systems. The development and expansion of urban areas is by no
54
means purely linear. Instead, it follows a logic formed by many interacting adaptive systems creating a complex CNH system.
5.5
The Ad Hoc Development of Urban Areas Most urban areas do not develop solely as centrally planned enterprises. Instead,
much of their development follows lines of economic incentive, cultural and personal preference and avoidance and navigation of obstacles, such as physical and economic barriers, zoning, local regulations and codes, and urban policies affect urban form often with unintended consequences (Bertaud 2004). As such, urban systems follow the development pattern of interacting adaptive systems, which mirror the adaptive nature of individuals striving for livelihood acting within widening spheres (or larger systems) discussed previously. In fact, the driver behind much of the urban growth that brought human populations to be over 50% urbanized by the end of 2008, was a large-scale migration of rural populations to urban areas, a phenomenon that is still occurring in the developing world at a much higher rate (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2011). Much of what occurs in the urban concentration of people, buildings, infrastructures and industries, happens as if by accident (Bertaud 2004). Urban sprawl in most of today’s metro areas, for instance, may be driven by a need for affordable housing or a desire to live in a less congested area away from the central city. Likewise, the growth of informal settlements in developing countries has resulted from an explosion of urban populations driving an equal upsurge in the need for housing and insufficient or non-existent options for legal housing. As such, urban area development is largely ad hoc, and this has resulted in large, polycentric conurbations surrounding most of today’s major cities. These polycentric metro areas have implications ranging from mitigation and resource use to disaster
55
response planning and evacuation routes (Bertaud et al. 2009; Bertaud 2004). An understanding of the constraints, options and environmental feedbacks that are presented to urban actors and sectors within the complex combined human natural systems we call cities must be rooted in an analysis of complex adaptive systems with a subdivision into multiple interacting systems.
5.6
Coupled Natural Human Systems (CNH) Human beings have been interacting with natural systems as long as there have
been human beings, but as human systems have become more complex, so have their interactions with the natural world (Liu et al. 2007). The interactions between human systems and natural systems may originate at the point of use, extraction or diversion of the ecosystem for natural goods and services, at the point of output of human processes to the environment or as environmental conditions or impacts that affect human activities, social systems, infrastructures and lives and livelihoods. These interactions are multi scalar, acting within and across spatial and temporal scales (Gunderson 2010). These bidirectional interactions can be seen as complex feedback loops acting in both positive and negative directions with the assignment of positive and negative being defined by the system of interest. Both human systems and ecosystems are adaptive, and there are similarities and differences between modes of adaptation in human and natural systems. One of the major similarities is in how human systems and natural systems form nested dependencies and interactions from smaller to larger spatial temporal scales. One of the major differences is that human systems have the ability to anticipate and adapt to future events and there is no evidence that natural systems share this ability (Gunderson 2010). This expression of difference between human and natural systems, of course, implies a
56
dichotomy, however, the concept of combined human natural systems assumes that no such division exists in reality, and distinctions are arbitrary (Adger 2006). I would go beyond this and say that these distinctions are purely a matter of framing and perspective from a human viewpoint. Within a hierarchal series of nested adaptive systems, human systems are subsumed under larger natural systems (Gunderson and Holling 2002), but this distinction is also critical in any attempt to understand and change human effects on natural systems. It might be appropriate to think of these effects, as they have become larger with increasing human populations and industrial outputs, as being a part of phase shifts towards human dominated ecosystems. The idea of a state of self-organized criticality (SOC) is one theory that may help explain how systems move from one state to the next. The simplest example of critical state is given by a sand pile (Bak 1996; Paczuski and Bak 1999). Imagine the simple example of a small boy on a beach letting a continuous stream of sand fall from his hand to create a pile. As the mound gets higher, the slope becomes more unstable, and while at the beginning of the process, the accumulation of a pile can be understood in terms of the individual grains of sand, in later stages a series of avalanches begins to change the shape of the pile and the dynamics of the mound can only be understood in terms of “a holistic description” of the properties of the entire pile (Bak 1996). While the dynamics of a sand pile are complex, Bak’s sand pile is a simplification of a process that is recurrent in natural and human systems alike (Bak 1996, Paczuski and Bak 1999). As it gets higher, the sand pile reaches a critical height and slope and the the forces of cohesion (e.g., friction, gravity, and planar interfacing of crystalline surfaces,
57
acting together) will be overcome by gravity acting against friction. At this critical point, the slope of the sides of the pile become unstable and a series of avalanches begin. The point at which the avalanches begin is the state of criticality of the system. Bak believes that complex systems, of which the sand pile is one of the easiest to cognitively grasp, all exhibit this type of periodic movement towards a state of criticality. Think of the pile again as the boy continues to release sand and it has avalanched repeatedly over time, and we can find another concept given in complex systems and ecosystems theory alike. Eventually a combination of interacting avalanches will bring the pile down to a relatively flat low mesa like mound with a larger diameter base. We can now say that the system has undergone a phase shift. By continually building the pile through a series of these phase shifts, the boy will eventually be able to build higher and higher piles with resulting larger and larger periodic avalanches. Two dimensional computer models of such sand piles have been shown to obey a power law distribution, as do many other natural phenomena such as earthquakes, evolution and canopy size gaps in the rainforest (Sole et al. 1996). This paper’s earlier discussion proposing a wave interaction model for hazards and vulnerability (fig. 3) can now be understood in terms points of criticality. As the two complex systems converge on a single point in space and time, their interactions can create points of criticality for various parts of the interacting system. We described these points of criticality as thresholds. Thresholds, described in the wave model diagram as points where impacts are unavoidable, can now be seen in terms of complex system theory as points where a sudden movement to another state, or phase-shift is unavoidable.
58
Holling and Gunderson (2002a) explain the dynamics of Bak’s sand pile model as it moves from low and stable beginnings to a critical state where avalanches are likely, as an example of a growth of potential within a large slow-moving system as it moves towards a release of potential. These stages are part of a process that can be found in adaptive systems and thee interactions of these systems creating larger systems. However, whereas the sand pile is a purely physical system (at least it would be without the boy), living systems have power to exert some measure of endogenous control and to transform elements of this cycle through mutations, mistakes and inventions. Holling and Gunderson’s conception encompasses the physical forces described by Bak and adds the endogenous forces shown in natural and human systems. These interacting systems form the basis of a theory of complex systems comprised of multitudinous, nested adaptive systems Holling and Gunderson (2002a) call panarchy.
Figure 9: Based on Holling and Gunderson (2002a) this figure shows the stages of an adaptive system in panarchy: α in an organization phase, which begins the cycle; r is an exploitation phase where as potential has built to its highest level with opportunities for exploitation; in the K phase, as exploitation reduces potential and the system moves towards conservation it increases forces of connectedness; finally, in the Ω phase, connectedness and conservation are maximized, further potential gains are limited and the system collapses and releases potential. Once potential is released, the system begins again at the reorganization (α) stage.
59
According to panarchy theory, ecosystems, and complex systems in general, go through four stages of an adaptive cycle (fig 9). These are (1) α or reorganization, which can be seen as organization at the beginning of Bak’s sand pile or reorganization with each iteration. Reorganization takes place where potential (opportunity) for exploitation has increased to its highest level; r or exploitation phase - where as potential builds, so do the possibilities for exploitation; however, exploitation also reduces potential and the system moves towards conservation. In the K phase, to conserve potential, the system increases forces of connectedness. In social systems these forces of connectedness can be rules, laws, constraints, caste systems or distribution systems. In biological systems they might be played by such factors as competition, cooperation, speciation or niche dynamics. In the case of purely physical systems like the sand pile, the forces of connectedness are physical-mechanical. When connectedness and conservation arrive at a point where further potential gains are limited, we have reached Bak’s critical point, the system collapses and releases potential in the Ω phase. Once potential is released, the system begins again at the reorganization (α) stage. Changes in human systems and their effects on natural systems are occurring at increased spatial and decreased temporal scales (Liu et al. 2007). Industrialization, globalization, urbanization, population growth and expanding urban populations and ecological footprints are frequently pointed to as factors affecting the speed and spatial range of these interactions (Rees 1992). Interactions between natural systems and human systems can lead to cyclical changes in state as shown in figure 10. Suppose, for instance, that a slow change in an ecosystem state, such as water clarity, reaches a threshold level (Ecrit) at which point a
60
shift in public opinion begins, which in turn moves the political process towards improvement of water quality. As the water clears, however, public opinion gradually relaxes, and controls on water quality are replaced with more pressing political issues; thus water clarity begins to deteriorate again to begin a new cycle (Scheffer et al. 2002). This cyclical pattern of public concern and issue mitigation is a common feature of political and bureaucratic systems in democratic countries. This of course is a simplification of the actual processes involved in creating such shifts. More factors than water quality alone will be involved in shifting public opinion. And, ultimately, public policy will be worked out in a complex process that includes both competing visions and interests and winners and losers (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2013). Human system interactions with the climate system are even more complex because they entail multiple interactions of many smaller systems and components. A panarchy of nested adaptive systems is operational at this level (Holling and Gunderson 2002a). Globalization has aligned many human systems in terms of patterns of extraction and consumption and so creates the potential for an exponential increase in human impacts on the climate system (Rees 1992).
61
Figure 10: Based on Scheffer et al. (2002) with modifications by author, this figure shows how interactions between natural systems and human systems can lead to cyclical changes in ecosystem state, or phase shifts based on the gradual accumulation of stressors (small arrows pointing right) and human system responses to changes in ecosystem state. As the system moves from the more desirable state at top to the less desirable state at the bottom, human interventions (small arrows pointing left) may move the system back to a more desirable state and begin the cycle over.
Imagine the process outlined in figure 10 operating at the level of the global climate system. GHGs resulting from human activity are concentrating in the Earth’s atmosphere. Human systems in coastal areas and elsewhere are experiencing shifts in local climate patterns, but the shifts are happening with a great deal of spatial and temporal variability. Therefore, scientists cannot attribute local weather events to global climate change caused by human loading of the atmosphere with GHGs, but can only present them as possible outcomes of changes in global climate patterns, which are themselves presented along probability lines as likely, very likely, etc. Therefore, movements in the political system to shift the global climate system will be dependent on many interacting factors. To name just a few, there will be political discourse that will play out across different interests and value systems and with unequal power levels among actors (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2013); economic tradeoffs will play out across a range of possible long and short-term economic and development outcomes (Cosens et al. 2014; Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2013); there will also be variability in perception and belief, conditioned by factors such as levels of education, scientific and other
62
information available, and where extreme events are occurring (on the other side of the world or in my back yard) (Brody et al. 2008). Figure 11 illustrates how the processes mentioned above may interact with large slow moving systems, such as the global climate system. The dynamics of the smaller systems interact with the larger systems as well as with each other. The overall movement of the system is created by movements, counter movements and interactions between many different subsystems. On the human systems side, the subsystems themselves are comprised of movements of many different individuals and actors. Shifts in such systems are characterized by non-linearity and phase shifts based on movement past a critical point (Holling and Gunderson 2002a; Scheffer et al. 2002; Cosens et al. 2014).
Figure 11: (by author) shows the dynamic interaction of the ecosystem with the smaller human subsystems of political discourse, economic tradeoffs and perception and belief. Large slow moving systems, such as the global climate system can be influenced by such subsystems, but only as the interactions and contradictions within the subsystems are resolved to move the small arrows to the left and counteract stressors, for instance, to reduce GHGs.
63
6
Case Studies
6.1
Superstorm Sandy Superstorm Sandy offers very compelling evidence of combined biophysical and
social system interactions that are likely to create increased hazards for coastal cities as climate change progresses. On October 29th 2012, after being downgraded to a post hurricane tropical storm, Sandy made landfall at Atlantic City, New Jersey. After forming late in the 2012 hurricane season, the storm had accelerated to category 2 level and moved through the Caribbean, hitting Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba and killing at least 44 people. It cut through the Bahamas with wind speeds of 100 miles per hour but slowed to category 1 as it headed for Florida. Sandy demonstrates how climate change may be related to changes in the intensity extreme weather events but also how system interactions may result in non-linear and unpredictable impacts. Sandy increased in size and intensity as a cold Jet Stream dipped southward from Canada into the eastern U.S. As the cold Arctic air hit the warm Atlantic air, the atmosphere (and Sandy) were energized. As such, Sandy can be seen as the result of combined climate/weather system. It has been suggested that the phenomenon that delivered the cold arctic air to energize Sandy is known as a Negative Arctic Oscillation (NAO) NAOs (fig 12) create a high pressure area over the Arctic, which resulted in the blocking pattern the forced Sandy’s westward turn (Greene et al. 2013; Halverson and Rabenhorst 2013). Although NAOs have been associated with retention of sea ice in the summer months, recent research shows that this pattern has been less likely to hold true (Greene et al. 2013). Further, the loss of sea ice may be associated with an increase in the frequency and 64
intensity of extreme weather in northern latitudes through a process called artic amplification (AA), whereby a loss of Artic sea ice and resulting increases in dark water absorbing heat cause more ice to melt and create higher amplitude slower moving Rossby waves above the Arctic and the northern latitudes. These in turn, may cause more persistent severe weather patterns such as heat waves, droughts and heavy rains (Frances and Vavrus 2012).
Figure 12 The Negative Arctic Oscillation conditions present when Sandy made landfall. These conditions are associated with higher pressure in the Arctic and a weakened polar vortex (yellow arrows). A high-pressure system stretching from Greenland to the northwest Atlantic prevented Sandy from veering northeast and out to sea as do most late season tropical storms heading up from the Caribbean. Instead, the storm took a sharp westward turn (a storm behavior never yet observed in records dating back to 1851), directly towards densely populated urban areas in New York and New Jersey, causing high winds, flooding and storm surge and extensive damage (Greene et al et al. 2013).
Impacts, such as those made possible by Sandy, exemplify the sudden convergence of multiple natural and human systems to create impacts. These impacts create challenges and constraints to the well-being, health, life, and routine daily activities of the individuals. Along its path, Sandy had impacts on the richest and poorest of nations that played out in differentiated patterns of impact and loss and killed a total of 200 people (Kunz et al. 2012). These multi-system interactions created a unique set of hazards, impacts, challenges and constraints and produced the need for an adaptive response by individuals, families, community networks, local and national NGOs, and 65
local, regional and national Governments. As sea level rise creates the possibility for more sudden and unexpected multi-system interactions, with larger and more intense storm surge events, and more frequent severe weather, these constraints and challenges will need to be confronted more frequently and at all levels of human organization. Coastal areas will face some of the largest of these challenges, and possibly the most frequent calls to find new ways of dealing with them. One study found differential impacts based on neighborhood level interviews six months after Sandy. In this study, socio-demographic confounding variables were controlled for to isolate the effects of social cohesion and trust. This study found that social cohesion was a controlling factor in perceptions of levels of recovery after the storm. Neighborhoods that lacked social cohesion tended to show difficulty recovering in Sandy’s aftermath. Individuals in these neighborhoods tended to respond in the negative when asked general questions about trust and social support, such as whether people can be trusted or whether the storm brought out the best in people. Respondents in these neighborhoods also reported higher levels of theft, looting, hoarding and vandalism during the storm and in its immediate aftermath (Thompson et al. 2013). While these are intriguing results, the study failed to consider how socioeconomic factors might play into social safety net issues like community trust and support and the drivers of those feelings of trust and support. Indeed, after controlling for socio-demographic factors, the study found the issues of trust and support cut across socio-economic lines (Tompson et al. 2013). There are several reasons to be skeptical of this assessment, however, and this conclusion may not be nearly as straightforward as the authors suggest. Since respondents in the areas with lower trust reported higher levels of
66
illegal activities such as looting, stealing and vandalism (Tompson et al. 2013), it is plausible that it was the high levels of illegal activity in the areas that made these respondents more likely to respond in the negative when asked questions about trust and social support. Did the particularly traumatic and criminal events in these areas affect the residents’ abilities to trust and thereby make recovery more difficult? Furthermore, in many metro areas where gentrification is occurring, neighborhoods have mixed socioeconomic populations and large income disparities across adjacent blocks or even along streets. Even where neighborhood boundaries exist, events like looting, stealing, and vandalism are likely to overflow these boundaries when large scale events like Sandy temporarily release some of the controls, such as routine neighborhood policing, regulations and laws that normally keep such activities in check. This can be seen as a sudden shift from formality to informality where norms and laws fall away. This sudden release, like uncorking a bottle, which can be seen as result of rapid system convergence and movement beyond a threshold, likely meant that looting, stealing and vandalism suddenly occurred across neighborhoods and socio-economic enclaves based on proximity. Where such rapid system convergences occurred, people were likely more traumatized by Sandy’s events. Another system convergence heightening Sandy’s impacts was a feedback from ecosystems resulting from near-shore ecosystem degradation.
6.1.1 Atlantic Coast Ecosystem and Natural Protective Services Coastal habitats present along the northeast coast of the US, such as sea grass and oyster beds, offer a great degree of protection to coastal populations and property. These services currently reduce by about 50% the proportion of people and property along US
67
coasts that are most exposed to sea level rise and coastal storms. Using an A2 (IPCC) scenario to predict SLR and population growth, the proportion of properties and people that will be put at risk y 2100 without these natural protections will be about 60% greater than they would be with them. For the New York area in particular, however, there will be an approximately 125% risk increase under an A2 scenario by 2100 without natural protections (Arkema et al. 2013).
Figure 13: (a.) The percentage of people and property that are currently protected and projected to be protected from SLR and storms by habitat under various scenarios and (b.) exposure in US coastal areas and projections for 2100, broken down by state, under an A2 scenario with and without such habitats. Source: Arkema et al. (2013).
Given, the current level of protection, it can be extrapolated that the effects of Sandy on populations and property in New York City could have been worse without current levels of ecosystem protection. However, it can also be assumed that current levels of ecosystem degradation resulted in higher levels of impact than would have happened if these protections had not been weakened by human system interactions.
6.2
Hurricane Katrina The impacts of Hurricane Katrina can provide evidence of a collision of physical
impacts with social forces conditioning vulnerability. As the storm cut across the coasts of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, it brought into broad relief the effects of 68
differential levels of social vulnerability and the sudden convergence of biophysical and human systems. Applying a social vulnerability index, Cutter et al. (2006) have shown that areas of New Orleans with the highest social vulnerability also experienced the most severe impacts (Wang et al.2014) have used regression analysis to look at the association between race, socio-economic class and elevation below sea level and have found that the highest associated population loss after Katrina was among poor blacks living at lower elevations. The colonial European city of New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville at the confluence of three navigable water bodies: the Mississippi river, Lake Ponchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico (Cutter et al. 2006), but the area’s settlement by indigenous peoples is much older. For the new city, the European settlers occupied the area currently known as the French Quarter (Cutter and Emrich 2006) on higher ground created by ancient mounds of calcium carbonate shells deposited by generations of indigenous people following their staple diet of mollusks. By the time New Orleans was hit by Katrina, however, the city had expanded well beyond the French Quarter, so that its largest areas of urban land use were situated on sinking clay soils seven feet below sea level (Comfort 2006). The city has struggled to maintain its original location by building levees and continuous silt removal to keep the Mississippi’s natural periodic delta shifts from occurring (Comfort 2006; Cutter et al 2006). The levee system was greatly augmented in the 1920s and 1930s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed many levees and installed pumps to prevent periodic flooding that had always affected the area previously (Comfort 2006). This marvel of human engineering of the natural delta system had wide ranging effects and feedback to the human system,
69
however, as over the years leading up to Katrina, the city slowly sank farther below sea level, as the levees constructed upriver prevented natural silt deposition along the Delta (Comfort 2006; Cutter et al 2006). When Katrina, a Category 4 hurricane, hit just east of New Orleans on August 29, 2005 at 6:10 a.m., many felt that the city had narrowly missed a catastrophe (Comfort 2006). The storm had weakened to Category 3 before making landfall, but it nonetheless moved large waves and storm surges across the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, carrying an approximately 5 meter surge that overtopped and breached sections of the city’s 4.5 meter levees, flooding approximately 70 to 80 percent of the urban area with some populations such as the elderly and the poor particularly hard hit (Romero-Lankao 2008; Cutter and Emrich 2006). The overall costs associated with Katrina were staggering, with some estimates of the economic damages putting the cost of the storm at an excess of US$100 billion, including 1.75 million private insurance claims costing an estimated $40 billion. In New Orleans alone, flooding of residential structures caused between $8-10 billion in losses, with between $3-6 billion in uninsured losses (Hartwig 2006). Hurricanes hitting the Gulf States have had increasing impacts in general based on the increased population and development along the coasts, but the costs of Katrina were the highest in US history (Cutter et al. 2006). Damage estimates for storms like Katrina are difficult to calculate with certainty. These estimates gather obvious costs to the people and places, infrastructures and industries directly affected by the storm and the costs of emergency support measures such as the creation of shelters that hosted tens of thousands of evacuees, temporary
70
schools, and human services. But less easy to assess are indirect and more widespread costs, such as increased fuel prices nationwide as damage to oil refineries lowered production at facilities in the Gulf region, or increased building construction costs as Gulf state reconstruction costs drove up prices for building materials across the southern U.S (Romero-Lankao 2008). Also often left out of these estimates are losses in informal economies, informal housing developments, or poor communities where values may be relatively low when measured against their formal equivalents. However, when economic damages to individuals from affluent communities are compared with those of individuals from poor communities in terms of percentage of net assets or livelihoods lost, the true value of those losses in vulnerable communities can be better understood. This elasticity of asset and livelihood losses is a current research gap in disaster analysis literature. Jonkman et al. (2009) performed an analysis of mortality rates based on flood characteristics and demographic features and examined the variance in mortality rates across demographic lines. In a simple statistical study of race as a factor in mortality, they tested the null hypothesis that mortality would be evenly distributed across populations, but found somewhat surprisingly that black populations were slightly less likely to die than their population percentage would predict. Even with this finding, however, the conclusions of the study point to a general agreement between the racial make-up of the population of two affected New Orleans parishes and the percentage of the population that died during the storm, a conclusion that must be questioned in the light of other research that has found exactly the opposite. One major weakness of the study, acknowledged by researchers, was an assumption that gender and race were
71
spatially homogenous across the two parishes. While the aggregation of these factors across spatial lines simplifies data calculations, conclusions based on this methodology are highly questionable. For instance, the study found a total black population in the two parishes was 59.4%, while the black mortality rate of the two parishes was 55.1%. What is obvious is that something other than race is playing into mortality and that race in itself may not be an adequate predictor for this factor. One clue to what this factor might be can be found in the percentage of the population of each of the two parishes that was black. In Orleans Parish, the black population given from the 2000 census was 66.6%, while the black population of St. Bernard Parish was 7.6%. Yet 73% of the New Orleans deaths from Katrina happened in Orleans parish (Brunkard et al. 2008). Also of note is that the social vulnerability index (SoVI) of Orleans Parish had been very high and remained so between 1960 and 2000, but the SoVI in St. Bernard Parish had been at approximately the same level as that of the Orleans Parish in 1960 but been reduced by 2000 (Cutter et al. 2006) . An evaluation of the evidence presented in both studies suggests that social vulnerability is a better predictor than race for deaths caused by hurricane Katrina, but that race may have been a factor determining social vulnerability in New Orleans. Other factors as well converged with the sheer strength of Hurricane Katrina to increase impacts on August 29th, 2005 and many of these can be related to a reduction of a series of protective ecosystem services that would otherwise have helped prevent such catastrophic impacts,
6.2.1 New Orleans Ecosystem Services Under natural conditions, sedimentary deposits build delta land and barrier islands to help protect the area surrounding New Orleans from large waves and storm surge;
72
however such human factors as construction of dikes and levees, deforestation and alteration of mangroves and other wetlands, and subsidence resulting from water extraction reduce a delta’s function as “natural” buffer against storm surges. According to USGS estimates, the state of Louisiana wetlands is currently losing land at about 75 square kilometers per year (see figure 14). This land loss prior to 2005 undoubtedly played a large part in the impacts resulting from Hurricane Katrina. With predicted increases in sea level rise, this issue will be greatly compounded.
Figure 14: From USGS the figure shows in the area of New Orleans since 1932 to 2000, with projected gain (in green) based on current interventions. Wetlands loss the state of Louisiana wetlands is currently at about 75 square kilometers per year and sea level rise due to climate change can be expected to compound loss of wetlands.
The issue of coastal wetlands loss in Louisiana has been well known at least since the 1970s, however, a disconnect between the political and economic agendas of the many different players and interests involved has often hobbled efforts to create meaningful actions to protect wetlands. It is often the case that when political discourse is framed around an immediate need for jobs (in the oil industry, for instance), public attitudes towards long term protective strategies can be shifted. Particularly troublesome are areas of supposed scientific uncertainty where public doubt of scientific findings can be fostered by public relations firms working for large economic or political interests. 73
While scientific reports such as the IPCC AR5 are framed in terms of probabilities and likelihoods in order to retain the integrity of the scientific process, public relations firms and politicians are under no such constraints and often engage in deliberate disinformation campaigns. To a large degree, governance is an exercise in the management of power through the mobilization and control of natural and human resources (Cosens et al. 2014). There is an interplay and interdependency between investment, governance, the political process and policy. The political inertia and underinvestment in New Orleans prior to Katrina interacted with the ecological system to produce tragic results. As illustrated by Katrina, transportation and communications infrastructure, buildings and other components of the built environment of coastal cities are especially vulnerable to such extreme events as sea level rise, floods and storms. To a lesser extent, but certainly still affecting these cities will be heat waves and drought. Climate change is expected to aggravate all these coastal urban area impacts. While the causes of Katrina cannot be directly attributed to climate change with certainty, the storm can provide an example of multiple interacting human and natural systems along the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005. It should be seen as evidence of the combining pressures of urban impacts with sea level rise and intense hurricanes. Particularly in delta regions, the resilience and sustainability in some densely populated cities of the world will be challenged by multiple human natural system interactions, not the least of which is climate change. Katrina is also exemplary, because its impact affected not a developing country, but the richest country in the world. Delta cities across the world are disaster zones in waiting, vulnerable to land subsidence, storm surge and
74
floods. Under natural conditions, delta lands are continually built up by river processes including flooding which replenish and build new land through sedimentary accretion. This process is interrupted through levee construction and dredging to keep waterways clear for marine traffic. Yet infrastructural supports such as levees are necessary to create stability and safety in urban areas, and processes such as river dredging are integral to urban economies. The loss of wetlands in coastal Louisiana has been scientifically understood since the 1970s, but political processes and short term economic considerations have slowed the implementation of mitigation plans (Romero-Lankao 2008). This sort of human system -- natural system dynamic - exemplifies the interactions of nested non-linear systems (depicted in figure 11.) It can be seen here that in the face of human interactions with the natural world, nature responds with feedback. However, the ability of the individuals to respond to that feedback, is deeply enmeshed in the interactions of human systems and is conditioned by such factors as access to resources, infrastructural supports, and economic and political concerns. Governmental policies and programs can help address these challenges, but governments often are unable to accomplish cohesive action due to a mismatch between spatial scales of the area or system of concern and boundaries of authority (Cosens et al. 2014) or the temporal scale of the issue and the timeframes of political terms. The tragic results of this mismatch, with equal measures of political inertia and underinvestment, could be seen in New Orleans in 2005. Any attempts urban systems make at sustainability will require an alignment of human and natural systems towards resilient states that meet the needs of both humans and nature. Until we reach that alignment, we will continue to see tragic losses and constrain any
75
ability to effectively deal with disasters and rebound. Whether delta cities, such as New Orleans, because of their many necessary interruptions of natural processes, can ever reach such an alignment is an open question.
7
Conclusions and Future Areas of Research Cities with their concentrations of people, industries and infrastructures are
hotbeds of both vulnerability to the effects of climate change and opportunities to create new ways of interacting with the natural world. Coastal cities have a special place among cities, because sea level rise and rapid population growth and development give these cities additional vulnerability to the effects of climate change. There are many future research opportunities in this area. The interactions between ecosystems and human systems to create combined human natural systems are only beginning to be understood. This paper has presented some of the ideas in this area and has asked how we can put together the knowledge of many distinct disciplines to move towards a theory that can understand the dynamic interplay between many different systems and components. The framework that I proposed was started at a livelihood perspective, with the strivings of an adaptive individual. This individual acted within a sphere that was larger than her and that sphere both limited and enabled her. These spheres that both limit and enable follow Blaikie and Wisner’s (1994; 2004) PAR and access theories deriving from distributions of power, structure, and resources with each system acting within a larger system of organization following the pattern of nested systems outlined in panarchy theory. While this model works well intuitively, it may prove difficult to quantify and would probably best be initially assessed through qualitative research.
76
I also derived a model of convergence of vulnerability with physical hazards, which resembles several vulnerability convergence models including PAR theory. My approach included a convergence point in time and space and a threshold where damage was impossible to avoid. I used wave interaction as a conceptual model and made no claim that it could be quantified. However, many attempts have been made to build vulnerability indices by adding together the effects of different factors, and this is a similar idea. Future research could assess whether indices of damage potential and vulnerability can follow a model like the conceptual model of wave convergence outlined in this paper. Similarly, the diagram in figure10 is an attempt to show how system interactions from multiple interacting systems might combine to create phase shifts in larger systems. Qualitative research could certainly show these interactions, but an area of future research would be to find ways to quantify them. Another intriguing idea is that these interacting adaptive systems actually exhibit wave characteristics, so analyzing there combinations using a wave dynamics model may prove fruitful. The Earth’s history is full of examples of phase shifts. In past millennia, Earth’s climatic system has moved through many phases without the push of interacting human systems. For almost as long as we have been on Earth, the relatively small and disconnected systems we humans have initiated have been benign compared to that large slow moving natural systems or quick natural shocks that pushed the Earth towards long lasing variations in climate patterns. From the perspective of human lifetime and generation, Earth’s climate has been relatively stable.
77
Beginning with industrialization and accelerating greatly with globalization, human inputs to the global climate system are rapidly changing this picture. As they exist today, human systems are interacting at much larger scales with the Earth’s natural systems, and urbanization has a large part in this change. Human interactions with Earth systems have grown exponentially, and our outputs as inputs to the environment have been replicated across vast numbers of humans on Earth. This number isn’t the same as human population, however. There are not seven billion humans equally affecting the environment only because there are not seven billion people equally participating in the global economy, but this number is also growing. We have entered a time in human history when a potential for replication of patterns of mass production and consumption across human populations has created huge interactions with Earth systems. We only ask ourselves: what would be the effect on the earth system if what we consume were also consumed by seven billion other humans across the planet? Yet this is precisely the question that we are not asking, as our economic paradigms foster western development models a necessary condition for human quality of life, and within these economic models is the idea that a constant growth and expansion is necessary to a healthy economy. Perhaps it is time for us to question this assumption and move to new models of economic development that integrate the health of ecosystems on which we and our cities, whether they are coastal or landlocked, depend (Rees 1992). Perhaps it is time for a new economic ethic of environmentalism.
78
8
Key Concepts and Terms Hazards are potential or looming perturbations and stresses to which urban
populations are exposed (Romero-Lankao et al. 2012).One can consider these like potential energy stored in a spring. The conditions that can make the spring release its energy are given by the local physical conditions, climate and topography. The populations living in this particular location at this particular time or during this particular timespan are said to be exposed to the hazard created by the potential or real impact or the physical conditions that make its occurrence likely (Romero-Lankao 2008; Turner 2003). Vulnerability is the degree to which a city, population, infrastructure or economic sector (i.e., a system of concern) is susceptible to and unable to cope with adverse effects of hazards or stresses such as heat waves, storms and political instability (Turner 2003). The concept of social vulnerability refers to the possibility that a system will be negatively affected by a hazard or stress, but it is also a relative property defining both the sensitivity and the capacity to cope with that stressor. In other words, vulnerability can be thought of as conditioned by an array of social and biophysical factors (O’Brien et al. 2004). An individual, household, or population is vulnerable to the risks associated with climate change if these risks may result in them being pushed below a threshold level of well-being (Heltberg and Bonch-Osmolovskiy 2011; Romero-Lankao 2008). Vulnerability is sometimes seen as an end point or the result of the net effect of climate change impacts minus adaptation. This perspective might be taken for instance, by policy makers weighing the potential costs and benefits of mitigation efforts (O’Brien 2009; Kelly and Adger 2000). At other times vulnerability is viewed as a starting point and seen
79
as a state generated by multiple social and biophysical processes. This perspective is usually taken in efforts to find vulnerability’s root causes to aid in developing actions or policies to reduce it (O’Brien et al. 2009; Kelly and Adger 2000) Risk is the possibility of loss, injury or death resulting from an impact. It is not merely a measure of the potential force of a physical event but results from a complex intersection of hazard vulnerabilities or low response capacities of exposed populations (Birkman et al. 2013; Cardona et al. 2012: Cardona 2004). Resilience will be defined here as the ability of a system to absorb disturbances while retaining its essential structure and functions (Leichencho 2011). For a city or an urban population this would mean a capacity for self-preservation through adaptation to stress and change. But is resilience a good thing in all cases? Some authors suggest that you might not want to have an authoritarian or depredatory urban regime bouncing back (Tyler and Moench 2012; Walker et al. 2002). The characteristic of resilience is essentially neutral and the resilience of a regime can be formed by democratic or authoritarian institutions. To make the distinction between what might be seen in democratic and authoritarian regimes, I propose that a distinction needs to be made between horizontal and vertical resilience. Whereas horizontal resilience might protect private property, key infrastructures, the propertied classes and the power structure, vertical resilience would be a resilience that cuts across boundaries of social class. Vertical resilience is, however, an idealized form of resilience and exists more theoretically than in reality. There is also almost certainly an overlap between the two forms of resilience because some degree of vertical resilience is necessary to assure
80
horizontal resilience, as a large unrest at the bottom would destabilize resilience at the top (Wisner et al. 2004). Adaptation to climate change is the process of making adjustments or modifications to accommodate changes that are occurring with climate change. Some of these predicted or probable changes include more frequent or intense flooding and droughts, increased frequency and intensity of wildfires, increased intensity of tropical storms, sea level rise, coastal inundation, and salt water intrusion. Actions taken in advance of or in response to these changes to avoid or ameliorate their negative consequences are adaptions (Romero-Lankao 2008; Ebi et al. 2006; Smit et al. 2001). Adaptive capacity refers to the potential to adapt. Factors that affect adaptive capacity include access to resources, social supports and safety nets, community cohesiveness, and access to the political system (Smit el al. 2001). Bangladesh offers an example of this. In 1991 a cyclone hit Bangladesh killing at least 138,000 people and leaving as many as 10 million people homeless. However, since that time local authorities, national governments and international organizations have taken actions to decrease the risk from tropical cyclones. For instance, the Bangladeshis developed an early warning system and constructed public shelters to host evacuees. These improvements were subsequently tested when Cyclone Sid hit in 2007. Although between 8 and 10 million Bangladeshis were exposed to Sid, perhaps the strongest cyclone to hit the country since 1991, there was a 32-fold reduction in the death toll (4,234 people compared to 138,000). This suggests that multiple factors create the conditions for vulnerability and adaptive capacity, and that these can be changed through context
81
specific actions. It suggests, furthermore, that vulnerability is not simply a quality of the physical characteristics of a place but is created by multiple factors. Response capacity is sometimes used synonymously with adaptive capacity but seems to be a broader term that includes both the generation of greenhouse gases and the associated consequences. It represents a broad pool of resources that may be related to socio-technical and economic development (Romero-Lankao 2008; Parry et al. 2007).
82
9
References
Adger, W. N., and Kelly, P. M. 1999. Social vulnerability to climate change and the architecture of entitlements. Mitigation and adaptation strategies for global change, 4(3-4), 253-266. Adger, W. N. 2006. Vulnerability. Global environmental change, 16(3), 268-281. Adelekan, I. O. 2009. Vulnerability of poor urban coastal communities to climate change in Lagos, Nigeria. Fifth Urban research symposium. June: 28-30. Arkema, K. K., Guannel, G., Verutes, G., Wood, S. A., Guerry, A., Ruckelshaus, M., ... and Silver, J. M. 2013. Coastal habitats shield people and property from sea level rise and storms. Nature Climate Change, 3(10), 913-918. Bak, P. (1996). How Nature Works. Springer New York. Beck, U. 1992. Risk society: Towards a new modernity (Vol. 17). Sage. Beck, U. 2002. The Terrorist Threat World Risk Society Revisited. Theory, Culture and Society, 19-4: 39-55. Beg, N., Morlot, J.C., Davidson,O. Afrane-Okesse,Y., Tyani, L., Denton, F., Sokona, Y., Thomas, J.P, Lèbre La Rovere, E., Parikh, J.K., Parikh, K., and Rahman, A.A. 2002. Linkages between climate change and sustainable development. Climate Policy 2:129–144 Berrang-Ford, L., Ford, J.D., and Paterson, J. 2010. Are we adapting to climate change? Global Environmental Change. 2: 25–33 Bertaud, A. 2004. The spatial organization of cities: deliberate outcome or unforeseen consequence. IURD Working Paper Series Bertaud, A., Lefèvre, B., and Yuen, B. 2009, June. GHG emissions. Urban mobility and efficiency of urban morphology: a hypothesis. In Marseille Symposium Report 5th Urban research symposium on cities and climate change: responding to an urgent agenda. Marseille, France (pp. 28-30). Biesbroek, G.B., Swart, R. J., Carter, T.R., Cowan, C., Henrichs, T. Mela, H., Morecroft, M.D., and Rey, D. 2010. Europe adapts to climate change: Comparing National Adaptation Strategies. Global Environmental Change. 20:440–450 Blaikie, P. Wisner, B., Cannon, T., and Davis, I.2004: At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability, and Disasters. Routledge, London. 464 pp Brocklesby, M. A., & Fisher, E. 2003. Community development in sustainable livelihoods approaches–an introduction. Community Development Journal, 38(3), 185198. Brody, S. D., Zahran, S., Vedlitz, A., and Grover, H. 2008. Examining the relationship between physical vulnerability and public perceptions of global climate change in the United States. Environment and Behavior, 40-1:72-95. Brunkard, J., Namulanda, G., and Ratard, R. 2008. Hurricane Katrina deaths, Louisiana, 2005. Disaster medicine and public health preparedness, 2(04), 215-223 Carpenter, S. R., Folke, C. 2006. Ecology for transformation. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 21(6), 309-315. Chambers, R., and Conway, G. 1992. Sustainable rural livelihoods: practical concepts for the 21st century. Institute of Development Studies (UK). Chan, Kam Wing, and Will Buckingham 2008. Is China abolishing the hukou system? The China Quarterly 195: 582-606. 83
Chan, Kam Wing. 2009 "The Chinese hukou system at 50." Eurasian geography and economics 50.2 197-221. Chong, A. E. and Gradstein, M., 2004. Inequality, Institutions, and Informality. InterAmerican Development Bank. Church, JA., Clark, P.U., Cazenave, A., Gregory, J.M., Jevrejeva, S. Leverman, A, Merrifield, M.A., Milne, G.A., Nerem, R.S., Nunn, P.D.,Payne, A.J., Pfeffer, W.T., Stammer, D., Unnikrishan, A.S. 2013. “Sea level Change,” in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assesment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Edited by Stocker, T.F., Qin, D., Plattner, K., Tignor, M., Allen, S.K., Boschung, J., Nauels, A., Xia, Y, Bex, V., Midgley, P.M. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 1137-1216 Comfort, L. K. (2006). Cities at Risk Hurricane Katrina and the Drowning of New Orleans Urban Affairs Review, 41(4), 501-516 Cosens, B., Gunderson, L., Allen, C., and Benson, M. H. (2014). Identifying Legal, Ecological and Governance Obstacles, and Opportunities for Adapting to Climate Change. Sustainability, 6(4), 2338-2356 Costanza, R., Pérez-Maqueo, O., Martinez, M. L., Sutton, P., Anderson, S. J., and Mulder, K. 2008. The value of coastal wetlands for hurricane protection. AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 37(4), 241-248. Cousins, J. J., & Newell, J. P. 2015. A political–industrial ecology of water supply infrastructure for Los Angeles. Geoforum, 58, 38-50. Crawford, C.A. 2011. Can humanitarian responses in urban areas reinforce underlying causes of vulnerability: Tweaking a livelihoods analysis of inequality and infrastructure in splintering cities. Environmental Hazards. 10: 327-345 Cronin, V., and Guthrie, P. 2011. Community-led resettlement: From a flood-affected slum to a new society in Pune, India. Environmental Hazards. 10:310-326 Crowell, M.; Coulton, K.; Johnson, C.; Westcott, J.; Bellomo, D., Edelman, S., and Hirsch, E., 2010. An estimate of the U.S.population living in 100-year coastal flood hazard areas. Journal of Coastal Research, 26-2: 201-211. Cutter, S. L., and Emrich, C. T. 2006. Moral hazard, social catastrophe: The changing face of vulnerability along the hurricane coasts. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 604-1: 102-112. Cutter, S. L., Emrich, C. T., Mitchell, J. T., Boruff, B. J., Gall, M., Schmidtlein, M. C. and Melton, G. 2006. The long road home: Race, class, and recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 48(2), 8-20. Cutter, S.L., Johnson, L.A., Finch, C., and Berry, M. 2007. The US Hurricane Coasts: increasingly vulnerable? Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 49(7), 8-21. de Sherbinin, A., Schiller A., and Pulsipher, A. 2007. The vulnerability of global cities to climate hazards Environment and Urbanization. 19-1: 39–64 Doornkamp, J. C. 1998. Coastal flooding, global warming and environmental management. Journal of Environmental Management. 52: 327–333 Dugan, J. E., Airoldi, L., Chapman, M. G., Walker, S. J., and Schlacher, T. 2011. 8.02 Estuarine and Coastal Structures: Environmental Effects, A Focus on Shore and
84
Nearshore Structures. In Chief: Treatise on Estuarine and Coastal Science. Edited by Wolanski, E. and McLusky, D. Academic Press, Waltham, 17-41. Eakin, H., and Luers, A. L. 2006. Assessing the vulnerability of social-environmental systems. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 31-1: 365-394 Ebi, K. L., Kovats, R. S., & Menne, B. 2006. An approach for assessing human health vulnerability and public health interventions to adapt to climate change. Environmental Health Perspectives, 1930-1934. Elliott, J. R., and Pais, J. 2006. Race, class, and Hurricane Katrina: Social differences in human responses to disaster. Social Science Research, 35-2: 295-321. Ejigu, A. G. 2011. Coupling informality with formality: Ideas for innovative housing and urban development strategy. 4th European Conference on African Studies (ECAS 4) African Engagements: On whose terms. Fatheuer, T. 2011. Buen Vivir: A Brief Introduction to Latin America's New Concepts for the Good Life and the Rights of Nature. Ecology. Heinrich Böll Foundation. Folke, C., Carpenter, S., Elmqvist, T., Gunderson, L., Holling, C. S., and Walker, B. (2002). Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations. AMBIO: A journal of the human environment, 31(5), 437-440. Francis, J. A., & Vavrus, S. J. 2012. Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid‐latitudes. Geophysical Research Letters, 39(6). Fussel, H.-M. 2007. Vulnerability: A generally applicable conceptual framework for climate change research. Global Environmental Change. 17: 155-167 Gasparini, L., & Tornarolli, L. 2009. Labor informality in Latin America and the Caribbean: patterns and trends from household survey microdata. Desarrollo y Sociedad, (63), 13-80. Gloppen, S., and St. Clair, A. L. 2012. Climate Change Lawfare. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 79-4: 899-930. Greene, C.H., J.A. Francis, and B.C. Monger. 2013. Superstorm Sandy: A series of unfortunate events? Oceanography 26(1):8–9, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2013.11 Grothmann, T., and Patt A. 2005. Adaptive capacity and human cognition: The process of individual adaptation to climate change. Global Environmental Change. 15:199– 213. Gunderson, L. (2010). Ecological and human community resilience in response to natural disasters. Ecology and Society, 15(2), 18. Gunderson, L. H. 2000. Ecological resilience--in theory and application. Annual review of ecology and systematics, 425-439. Gunderson, L. H., and Holling, C. S. 2002. Panarchy. Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island, Washington. Halverson Jeffery B. and Rabenhorst Thomas (2013) Hurricane Sandy: The Science and Impacts of a Superstorm, Weatherwise, 66:2, 14-23 DOI:10.1080/00431672.2013.762838 Heltberg, R., and Bonch-Osmolovskiy, M. 2011. Mapping vulnerability to climate change. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 5554. Holling, C. S., Gunderson L.H., and Ludwig D., 2002a. “Resilience and Adaptive Cycles”in Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems, edited by Lance H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling. Island Press, Washington. 25-62 85
Holling, C. S., Gunderson L.H., and Peterson G. D. 2002b. “Sustainability and Panarchies” in Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems, edited by Lance H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling. Island Press, Washington. 63-102 Henkel, K. E., Dovidio, J. F., and Gaertner, S. L. 2006. Institutional discrimination, individual racism, and Hurricane Katrina. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 6(1), 99-124. Ibarraran, M.E., Malone, E.L., and Brenkert, A.L. 2010. Climate change vulnerability and resilience: current status and trends for Mexico. Environment, Development and Sustainability. 12: 365–388 Jonkman, S. N., Maaskant, B., Boyd, E., and Levitan, M. L. 2009. Loss of life caused by the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: analysis of the relationship between flood characteristics and mortality. Risk Analysis, 29-5: 676-698. Kelly, P. M., and Adger, W. N. 2000. Theory and practice in assessing vulnerability to climate change andFacilitating adaptation. Climatic change, 47(4), 325-352. Kunz, M., Mühr, B., Kunz-Plapp, T., Daniell, J. E., Khazai, B., Wenzel, F. and Zschau, J. 2013. Investigation of superstorm Sandy 2012 in a multi-disciplinary approach. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Discussions, 1(2), 625-679. Landsea, C. W., Vecchi, G. A., Bengtsson, L., and Knutson, T. R. 2010. Impact of Duration Thresholds on Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Counts. Journal of Climate, 23(10), 2508-2519. Levy, M., Babu, S., Hamilton, K . 2005. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Chapter 5: Ecosystem Conditions and Human Well Being. Island Press. Washington DC Leichenko, R. 2011. Climate change and urban resilience. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 3-3: 164-168. Liang, Z., and Ma, Z. 2004. China's floating population: new evidence from the 2000 census. Population and development review, 30(3), 467-488. Liu, J., Dietz, T., Carpenter, S. R., Folke, C., Alberti, M., Redman, C. L., and Provencher, W. 2007. Coupled human and natural systems. AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36(8), 639-649. Luers, A. L. 2005. The surface of vulnerability: an analytical framework for examining environmental change. Global Environmental Change. 15-3: 214-223. McGranahan, G., Balk, D., and Anderson, B. 2007. The rising tide: assessing the risks of climate change and human settlements in low elevation coastal zones. Environment and Urbanization 19-1:17–37 McGranahan, G., Marcotulio, P. 2005. Urban Systems. in Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: Chapter27. Ecosystems and Human Well Being. 795-825 Moser, S. C. 2008. Resilience in the face of global environmental change. CARRI Research Paper 2 Mustelin, J., Klein, R. G., Assaid, B., Sitari, T., Khamis, M., Mzee, A., and Haji, T. 2010. Understanding current and future vulnerability in coastal settings: community perceptions and preferences for adaptation in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Population and Environment, 31-5: 371-398. Nicholls, R. J., and Cazenave, A. 2010. Sea level rise and its impact on coastal zones. Science. 328(5985), 1517-1520.
86
Nicholls, R. J., Frank M.J .Hoozemans, F.M., and Marchand, M. 1999. Increasing flood risk and wetland losses due to global sea level rise: regional and global analyses. Global Environmental Change. 9: 69-87. Nicholls, R. J., Wong, P. P., Burkett, V., Woodroffe, C. D. and Hay, J. 2008. Climate change and coastal vulnerability assessment: scenarios for integrated assessment. Sustainability Science. 3-1: 89-102. O'Brien, K.L. and Leichenko, R.L. 2000. Double exposure: assessing the impacts of climate change within the context of economic globalization Global Environmental Change. 10:221-232 O’Brien, K., Leichenko, R., Kelkar, U., Venema, H., Aandahl, G., Tompkins, H., Javed, A., Bhadwal, S., Barg, S., Nygaard, L., and West, J. 2004. Mapping vulnerability to multiple stressors: climate change and globalization in India. Global Environmental Change , Part A: Human and Policy Dimensions. 14-4: 303–313 O'Brien, K. L., Eriksen, S., Schjolden, A., and Nygaard, L. 2009. What’s in a word? Conflicting interpretations of vulnerability in climate change research. Center for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO). 1-16 Paczuski, M., & Bak, P. (1999). Self-organization of complex systems. arXiv preprint cond-mat/9906077. Parry, M.L., ed. 2007. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Working Group II Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Vol. 4. Cambridge University Press Pelling, H. E., Uehara, K., & Green, J.A.M. 2013. The impact of rapid coastline changes and sea level rise on the tides in the Bohai Sea, China. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 118(7), 3462-3472. Pellizzoni, L. 2011. Governing through disorder: Neoliberal environmental governance and social theory. Global Environmental Change, 21(3), 795-803. Perry, G., Maloney, W., Arias, O., Fajnzylber, P., Mason, A., & Saavedra, J. (2007). Informality: Exit and Exclusion, World Bank Latin America and Caribbean Studies. World Bank, Washington DC. Pielke Jr, R. A., Gratz, J., Landsea, C. W., Collins, D., Saunders, M. A., and Musulin, R. 2008. Normalized hurricane damage in the United States: 1900–2005. Natural Hazards Review, 9(1), 29-42. Pielke Jr, R. A., and Landsea, C. W. 1998. Normalized hurricane damages in the United States: 1925-95. Weather and Forecasting, 13(3), 621-631. Pörtner, H.O., Karl, D.M., Boyd, P.W., Cheung, W.W.L., Lluch-Cota, S.E., Nojiri,Y., Schmidt, D.N. and Zavialov, P.O. 2014: Ocean systems. In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Edited by Field, C.B., Barros V.R., Dokken, D.J., Mach, K.J., Mastrandrea, M.D., Bilir, T.E., Chatterjee, M., Ebi, K.L., Estrada, Y.O., Genova, R.C., Girma, B., Kissel, E.S., Levy, A.N., MacCracken, S.,Mastrandrea, P.R., and White, L.L. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 411-484. Rakodi, C, and Lloyd-Jones, T. 2002. Urban livelihoods: a people-centred approach to reducing poverty.
87
Ranjan, P., Kazama, S., and Sawamoto, M. 2006. Effects of climate change on coastal fresh groundwater resources. , Global Environmental Change. Springer, Netherlands. 16:388-399 Renuad, F., Sudmeier-Rieux, K., and Estrella, M. eds. 2013. The role of ecosystems in disaster risk reduction. United Nations University Press Reese, W. (1992). Ecological Footprint and appropriated carrying capacity. Urbanization & Environment, 4(2). Revi, A., Satterthwaite, D.E., Aragón-Durrand, F., Corfee-Morlot, J., Kiusi, R.B.R, Pelling, M., Roberts, D.C., and Solecki, W. 2014: Urban Areas. In Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Edited by Field, C.B., Barros V.R., Dokken, D.J., Mach, K.J., Mastrandrea, M.D., Bilir, T.E., Chatterjee, M., Ebi, K.L., Estrada, Y.O., Genova, R.C., Girma, B., Kissel, E.S., Levy, A.N., MacCracken, S.,Mastrandrea, P.R., and White, L.L.Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 535-612. Romero-Lankao, P. 2008. Urban areas and climate change: Review of current issues and trends. Issues Paper for UN-Habitat 2011 Romero-Lankao, P., & Dodman, D. 2011. Cities in transition: transforming urban centers from hotbeds of GHG emissions and vulnerability to seedbeds of sustainability and resilience: Introduction and Editorial overview. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 3(3), 113-120. Romero-Lankao, P., Gnatz, D. 2011. Global report on human settlements: UNITED NATIONS HUMAN SETTLEMENTS PROGRAMME Ch1: 1-16 Romero-Lankao, P., Gnatz, D. 2014. A History of Water, Series III volume 1 Part IV: Urbanism and the Water Illusion.. Mexico City: A Tale of Water Development, its Values and Challenges. I.B. Taurus, London. Ch 28: 623-644 Romero-Lankao, P., and Gnatz, D. M. 2013. Exploring urban transformations in Latin America. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 5(3), 358-367. Romero-Lankao P, Hughes S, Rosas-Huerta A, Borquez R, Gnatz D M, 2013. Institutional capacity for climate change responses: an examination of construction and pathways in Mexico City and Santiago Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 31-5: 785 – 805 Romero-Lankao, P., and Qin, H. 2011. Conceptualizing urban vulnerability to global climate and environmental change. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. 3:142–149. Romero-Lankao, P., Qin, H., and Borbor-Cordova, M. 2013. Exploration of health risks related to air pollution and temperature in three Latin American cities. Social Science and Medicine. 1-9 Romero-Lankao, P., Qin, H., and Dickinson, K. 2012. Urban vulnerability to temperature-related hazards: A meta-analysis and meta-knowledge approach. Global Environmental Change, 22-3: 670-683. Rothman, D. S., and Robinson, J. B. 1997. Growing pains: a conceptual framework for considering integrated assessments. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 46:12, 23-43.
88
Roy, A. 2005. Urban informality: toward an epistemology of planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 71(2), 147-158. Salafsky, N, and Wollenberg, E. 2000. Linking Livelihoods and Conservation: A Conceptual Framework and Scale for Assessing the Integration of Human Needs and Biodiversity. World Development 28-1: 1421-1438 Sanderson, D. 2000. Cities, disasters and livelihoods. Environment and Urbanization, 12(2), 93-102. Satterthwaite, D., Hug, S., Pelling, M., Reid, A. and Romero-Lankao, P. 2007 Building Climate Change Resilience in Urban areas and among Urban Populations in Low- and Middle-income Countries. International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) Research Report. Simon, H. A. 1977. The organization of complex systems. In Models of Discovery (pp. 245-261). Scheffer, M., Westley F., Brock, W., and Holmgren, M. 2002. “Dynamic Interactions of Societies and Ecosystems—Linking Theory’s from Ecology, Economy and Sociology” in Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems, edited by Lance H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling Island, Washington. 63-102 Smith, S. V., and Buddemeier, R. W. 1992. Global change and coral reef ecosystems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 89-118. Smit, B., & Pilifosova, O. 2003. Adaptation to climate change in the context of sustainable development and equity. Sustainable Development, 8(9), 9 Temmerman, S., Meire, P., Bouma, T. J., Herman, P. M., Ysebaert, T., and De Vriend, H. J. (2013). Ecosystem-based coastal defense in the face of global change. Nature, 504(7478), 79-83. Tompson, T., Benz, J., Agiesta, J., Cagney, K., and Meit, M. 2013. Resilience in the Wake of Superstorm Sandy, Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Tsai, Y. H. 2005. Quantifying urban form: compactness versus' sprawl'. Urban studies, 42(1), 141-161. Turner, B. L., Matson, P. A., McCarthy, J. J., Corell, R. W., Christensen, L., Eckley, N., ... and Tyler, N. 2003. Illustrating the coupled human–environment system for vulnerability analysis: three case studies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(14), 8080-8085 Tyler, S., & Moench, M. 2012. A framework for urban climate resilience. Climate and Development, 4(4), 311-326. Uy, N., & Shaw, R. Eds. 2012. Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (Vol. 12). Emerald Group Publishing. Wang, Fahui, Quan Tang, and Lei Wang. 2014. "Post-Katrina Population Loss and Uneven Recovery in New Orleans, 2000-2010." Geographical Review 104, no. 3: 310327. Wilbanks, T., Romero Lankao, P. with Manzhu Bao (China), Frans Berkhout (The Netherlands), Sandy Cairncross (UK), Jean-Paul Ceron (France), Manmohan Kapshe (India), Robert Muir-Wood (UK), Ricardo Zapata-Marti (ECLAC / Mexico) 2007. Chapter 7: Industry, Settlement, and Society” IPCC WGII Fourth Assessment Report, Cambridge University, pp.357-391
89
Wing Chan, K., & Buckingham, W. 2008. Is China abolishing the hukou system? The China Quarterly, 195, 582-606. Wisner, B., Blaikie, P. Cannon, T and Davis, I. 2004. At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability, and Disasters. Routledge, London. 464 pp Wong, P.P., I.J. Losada, J.P. Gattuso, J. Hinkel, A. Khattabi, K.L. McInnes, Y. Saito, and A. Sallenger, 2014. Coastal systems and low-lying areas. In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Edited by Field, C.B., Barros V.R., Dokken, D.J., Mach, K.J., Mastrandrea, M.D., Bilir, T.E., Chatterjee, M., Ebi, K.L., Estrada, Y.O., Genova, R.C., Girma, B., Kissel, E.S., Levy, A.N., MacCracken, S.,Mastrandrea, P.R., and White, L.L. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 361-409. Xue, Z., Feng, A., Yin, P., & Xia, D. 2009. Coastal erosion induced by human activities: a northwest Bohai Sea case study. Journal of Coastal Research, 723-733. Zhang, K., Leatherman, S. 2011. Barrier Island Population along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Journal of Coastal Research. 27-2: 356-36. Zhao, X., Li, X., & Wang, W. 2013 (October). Relying on the development zones to promote the development of Hebei coastal areas. In International Academic Workshop on Social Science (IAW-SC-13). Atlantis Press.
90
