Assessing Community Resilience to Coastal Hazards in the Lower Mississippi River Basin

This paper presents an assessment of community resilience to coastal hazards in the Lower Mississippi River Basin (LMRB) region in southeastern Louisiana. The assessment was conducted at the census block group scale. The specific purpose of this study was to provide a quantitative method to assess and validate the community resilience to coastal hazards, and to identify the relationships between a set of socio-environmental indicators and community resilience. The Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) model was applied to assess the resilience of the block groups. The resilience index derived was empirically validated through two statistical procedures: K-means cluster analysis of exposure, damage, and recovery variables to derive the resilience groups, and discriminant analysis to identify the key indicators of resilience. The discriminant analysis yielded a classification accuracy of 73.1%. The results show that block groups with higher resilience were concentrated generally in the northern part of the study area, including those located north of Lake Pontchartrain and in East Baton Rouge, West Baton Rouge, and Lafayette parishes. The lower-resilience communities were located mostly along the coastline and lower elevation area including block groups in southern Plaquemines Parish and Terrebonne Parish. Regression analysis between the resilience scores and the indicators extracted from the discriminant analysis suggests that community resilience was significantly linked to multicomponent capacities. The findings could help develop adaptation strategies to reduce vulnerability, increase resilience, and improve long-term sustainability for the coastal region. © 2016 by the authors.