Incorporating Equity and Social Vulnerability Into the Design of Flood Risk Mitigation Strategies

The Approach

The project team conducted scenario-building workshops with local/regional planners, residents, and other stakeholders in four different coastal communities in Louisiana to identify decision-relevant measures of the impacts nonstructural risk mitigation strategies could have on equity, social vulnerability, economic risk, and resilience at the individual/household and community levels.

Working with community members in a workshop setting, the project team co-produced “decision trees” which examined actions or inactions and each scenario’s impact. The groups produced these decision trees for each of the following scenarios: no action, differing residential elevation, and voluntary acquisition. Through the development of these decision trees, the groups identified impacts to the individual and community if these nonstructural mitigation strategies were, or were not, implemented. Through this process, the project team identified several "tipping points" beyond which community members are likely to move away from the community.

The decision trees showed that while there are site-specific elements that are localized to one community, many others, such as flood depths, affordability, quality of life, and sense of community are considered important across the Louisiana coastal zone.

After working with communities, the project team collected and analyzed relevant federal, state, and local data to support development of a customized decision support tool to address the needs identified with each community.

The resulting publicly available tool provides interactive visual information about each localized community, but also serves as a centralized location for users to access data visualizations of coastwide population change and flood exposure over time.