Full Citation
Title: Individual-Oriented Assessment of Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: A key limitation of models of social vulnerability to environmental hazards is that they areoften developed without explicit controls for how individuals fare in emergencies and disasters.Individuals (people, households) are central to the problem of social vulnerability assessment: theyare the scale at which hazard exposures and impacts are directly felt. While population-levelaggregates (i.e., median age, percent in poverty) are frequently used as proxies for individual-levelhazard risk, conflating these scales can hold unintended consequences for the actionability of socialvulnerability metrics. Population-level data is not an exact substitute for individual-level data: itoften omits key details on the drivers and priorities among populations at risk during an emergencyor disaster that are vital to planning/emergency response decision support. In response to thisproblem, this work develops new models that rely on individual-level, rather than population-leveldata as the initial point for measuring social vulnerability. This approach enables a more holisticunderstanding of social vulnerability that relays how individual experiences of hazards scale up tocollective (population-level) concerns. This dissertation consists of three case studies. The firsttwo, focused on the effects of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 in New York City, develop an “Individual toPlace” model of social vulnerability on census microdata that couples individual and population-level concerns to understand the social conditions underlying differential experiences of disasters.The third case study, which involves the 2011 North American Heat Wave in Houston, Texas, usescommunity-based survey data to understand how social conditions and practices directly influenceindividual-level hazard impacts (heat-related illness).
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Tuccillo, Joseph Vincent
Institution: University of Colorado
Department: Geography
Advisor:
Degree:
Publisher Location:
Pages:
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Other
Countries: