This week, we focus on the first of the four phases of emergency management - vulnerability assessment and hazard mitigation. We will read about risk mapping and vulnerability assessment using spatial data and GIS. Building on the background knowledge we've gained from previous lessons, each of you will conduct an analysis of Heatwave vulnerability, impacts, and mitigation strategies using social and environmental data. You will also continue making progress on the term project assignment.
The improvement of the built and social environment in order to reduce, withstand, or prevent disaster impacts.
By the successful completion of Lesson 3, you should be able to:
describe the concepts associated with risk mapping and vulnerability assessment,
conduct your own vulnerability assessment using social and environmental spatial data and summarize your findings in a short essay,
conduct background research for your final project,
and discuss the technology trend of volunteered geographic information (VGI).
Lesson 3 is one week in length. To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below.
To Read |
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To Do |
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Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific timeframes and due dates.
If you have questions about the content or lesson activities, please post them to the General Questions and Discussion forum in Canvas. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help a classmate. If your question is of a personal nature, please email me directly through Canvas.
Developing a clear picture of an area's vulnerability to hazards and disasters is a non-trivial task. It's hard to predict exactly what could happen in a disaster situation. However, even a rough estimate can be a huge help to emergency managers and decision makers who can use that information to develop plans for allocating resources and managing recovery operations. By collecting socio-economic and environmental data sources in a GIS, for instance, we can develop risk maps to highlight the potential impact of disasters on people and infrastructure. In this lesson, we will examine some of the specific analytical methods for doing a vulnerability assessment, and we will reflect on the critical issues associated with planning an emergency management GIS system that includes vulnerability assessment as one of its key functions. Most systems for geospatial and emergency management are designed for reaction, not prediction and mitigation, but that’s changing fast.
There is a wide range of relevant questions to consider when conducting a vulnerability assessment, including answers to the following key questions:
Here are a couple of examples of web-based services providing geospatial data on hazards and vulnerability; there are many others!
The first example is a map service developed and maintained by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that coordinates and conducts a great deal of vulnerability assessment work [2], including flood mapping. FEMA flood maps are used to help set flood insurance rates, among other things. The flood mapping tool [3] shows an overview of ongoing FEMA flood mapping, levee repair, and other flood-related risk assessment and mitigation tasks. Contrast this with recent research reported in this interactive New York Times page - New Data Reveals Hidden Flood Risk Across America [4]. Note: you shoudl be able to view the interactive maps without a subscription, but if you are having trouble, you can view a copy of the article on the following page in Canvas.
The United Nations engages with other entities to develop risk maps for developing countries where they are likely to be involved in future disaster situations. If you check out the map above [5] in greater detail, notice who the collaborators are. They include several NGOs, as well as Munich Re, a major re-insurance player. Interesting, huh?
Keep this Indonesia map in mind, because later in the course you will be considering the 2018 Sulawesi Earthquake and Tsunami in greater detail.
Some private sector firms provide what is known as Address Risk Rating products - in essence, you can look up a specific address and get a report outlining all of the vulnerabilities associated with that location. One of our PSU faculty, Dr. James O'Brien, works for Risk Frontiers [6] in Australia, a firm that works on Address Risk Rating products among others. Here is another example, UNHaRMED [7] model, from the University of Adelaide and the Australian Bushfire and Natural Hazard Cooperative Research Centre.
These examples don't explicitly consider people and the wide range of factors that make some people and places vulnerable while others are not. You will see it is not just a matter of whether you are inside or outside of an impacted area. Geographers have done a lot of work on social vulnerability analysis as part of a rich tradition of Hazards Research.
In this week's hands-on exercise, you will be working with some data related to heatwaves in the USA. Through this work, you will gain an understanding of vulnerability assessment approaches using geospatial data and how they can be used to understand some of the priority areas for action leading up to and during a disaster.
Before conducting the analysis and developing the accompanying short report, I would like you to watch a short overview video on Social Vulnerability Indices (SVI), read a chapter from your textbook on GIS and Disaster Mitigation, and read a journal article on Social Vulnerability to Natural Hazards in Brazil. This material will help you gain an understanding of the human dimensions of vulnerability that I mentioned previously.
Please watch this 3:45 minute video on Social Vulnerability Indices (SVI) from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
GIS for Disaster Management - Chapter 8 "Geographic Information Systems and Disaster Mitigation (pp. 233-250)
In this chapter from your textbook, the author goes into some good detail on assessing and modeling risk and vulnerability using GIS, including where to get data to do your own and a few straightforward analysis steps using GIS. It also includes core concepts associated with evaluating mitigation policies as well as the ways in which people can develop social and environmental variables to model risk and resilience.
Loyola Hummell, Cutter, Emrich (2016). Social Vulnerability to Natural Hazards in Brazil. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, volume 7 (issue 2), 111-122 [8]. This final reading will serve as a rough model for what we will work on next in the hands-on portion of this exercise.
OPTIONAL / FYI - Georgianna Strode et al. (2020). Exploratory Bivariate and Multivariate Geovisualizations of a Social Vulnerabity Index [9].
The last year has seen extreme heatwaves affecting much of the world including in China, India, the USA, and Europe. Heatwaves damage infrastructure, overload power grids, reduce work safety and productivity, and have negative impacts on quality of life in general. Moreover, more deaths and illness are due to heatwaves than any other natural disaster, and in the case of the USA and Australia, more than all other natural disasters combined.
Heatwaves can also compound the impacts of other types of disasters. For example, earlier this year Australia experienced extreme flooding followed by a heatwave. This led to a situation where people were outside cleaning up when temperatures were dangerously high.
Heatwave deaths and illness are generally thought of as being entirely preventable. That is, proper mitigation, preparedness and response activities can be undertaken to minimize or eliminate harm e.g., through effective heatwave warning systems and providing the public with “cool places” to get out of the heat.
There is also a strong emphasis on planning and implementing mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce vulnerability and promote resilience when heatwaves strike. For example:
Urban planning might focus on “green and blue infrastructure” to reduce Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects;
Social welfare groups (e.g., Red Cross) have “opt-in” systems where vulnerable older people are contacted throughout the heatwave event to make sure they are coping well; and/or
Heat-health outreach to help educate the community about the dangers of extreme heat, how to respond to warning messages, and what steps to take.
Heatwave vulnerability and impacts are not spread evenly across populations and geography. This has a lot to do with differences in socioeconomic factors and characteristics of the built environment e.g., low tree cover, poorly designed housing. Just as there is a geography to vulnerability and impacts, there is also a geography to potential solutions. We often think of these as “spatially targeted interventions”.
In this exercise, you will consider these issues in greater detail and use spatial data and analysis to identify patterns of vulnerability and potential impact along with ways of addressing risk and reducing vulnerability.
In this section, you will take a close look at key characteristics of heatwaves, trends related to climate change, and some of the direct impacts of heat on people. You will produce a few graphs and maps that will be incorporated into your write-up in Part 4.
Understanding Heatwaves (2:05)
From the video, take note of these key characteristics of heatwaves:
Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology Heatwave Forecast Service [11]
Heatwaves are not defined just based on temperature, rather humidity and longer term trends (acclimatization) need to be incorporated. In the map above based on Excess Heat Factor (EHF), heatwaves are classified into three types, based on intensity. Note these mention potential impacts on people, infrastructure and the environment.
Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology Heatwave Forecast Service [11]
Heatwave occurrence, duration and severity have all been changing over time. There are several important drivers of heatwaves, including reduction in vegetation cover and more built-up (impervious) surfaces in cities. Climate change is perhaps the strongest factor causing changes in heatwave characteristics (see list above).
Consider the following series of maps showing annual temperature trends in the USA. These patterns are similar to what we are observing globally.
In addition to changes in average temperatures, there have also been changes in the occurrence of extreme events. The following diagram illustrates this, where a shift in mean climate results in more hot and extreme days. As an aside, there is a growing interest in the effects 'chronic heat' on health and wellbeing i.e., hot days but not falling into the 'heatwave' range.
You will finish off this section by conducting some analysis of trends in the key heatwave characteristics (mentioned above) in the USA.
This section focuses on some of the "direct effects" of heatwaves on people, including deaths and illness.
The following image is a warning poster produced by the SA Health to help people recognize the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Note this is advice aimed at everyone and not targeted to specific groups or places.
Heat-Related Illness Signs, Symptoms And Treatment
Public warning message, such as this, provide simple and consistent information. These are linked to dedicated websites focused on heat related health. Have a quick look at these two examples, again noting that heatwave illness and deaths are, in theory, entirely preventable.
Heatwaves also have significant impacts on critical infrastructure and the environment. We won't go into much detail, but watch this short video from the Today Show, noting the reporting on impacts to critical infrastructure and the environment. If you want to learn more, there is no shortage of news coverage and research literature on these impacts.
Record-Shattering Heat Wave Leads To Deaths Across Britain (2:24)
You will finish off this section by looking at some trends in heat related deaths and illness.
So far we have considered broad trends in heatwave characteristics and direct impacts on people (e.g., heat stroke) and infrastructure. In this section you will consider some of the factors that make a person or community more vulnerable to adverse heatwave impacts. We will be taking a much more granular look at the problem in this and the following sections.
We are going to focus on heatwave vulnerability and impacts from the perspective of human health. This figure illustrates the basic problem - people must maintain their body temperature within a specific range to avoid adverse health outcomes. This is influenced by the ambient environment and characteristics of that person e.g., do they have existing health problems that may compromise their ability to thermo-regulate?
There are also a set of broader factors influencing heat health. The framework illustrated in this figure was used in a recent study to understand heat health vulnerability [21]. This is similar to the CDC Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) you would have seen in one of the previous videos, however the focus here is explicitly on heatwaves.
Generally speaking, indices are designed to help us describe concepts that are not able to be measured directly. For example, "Vulnerability" or "Socioeconomic status" are a multidimensional concept that cannot be measured with a single variable. There are many different indices developed for different purposes. Here you will take a closer look at two of the most widely used approaches.
Have a closer look at the FEMA's National Risk Index website [23]. There are three components to the NRI:
Note that the Social Vulnerability component is based on another index called the Social Vulnerability Index, or SoVI. This is one of the first approaches ever developed for emergency management, and it uses principal components analysis PCA) to reduce a set of variables to one index representing low to high vulnerability.
Similarly, Community Resilience is based on another commonly used approach called Baseline Resilience Indices for Communities (BRIC). BRIC also uses a set of indicators to build up the indices, but it does this through a "standardize and rank approach". To learn more, have a look at the NRI website and/or download the NRI manual [24].
When considering index approaches such as these (and any dataset for that matter), it is important to consult available metadata and "data dictionaries" (e.g.,here is the NRI data dictionary [25]), sometimes referred to as the Data Item List (DIL), that goes with a given dataset. You will find the NRI data in the ArcGIS Pro Project accompanying this lesson. I have mapped the SoVI component of the NRI. Have a look at the NRI attribute table, scan the field names, and look up a few variables in the data dictionary.
Next, have a closer look at the CDC Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) [26]. The SVI takes an approach that is similar to BRIC, where individual variables are used to calculate sub-indices (Themes) and then the overall index. For example, Socioeconomic Status cannot be measured directly, so "below poverty" line, "Unemployed", "Income", and "No High School Diploma" are combined to get at this construct.
Note the table accompanying the SVI feature class includes the underlying data that is used in the index calculations. If you want to "unpack" a given index, you can look at individual variables. For example, you may observe a "vulnerability hotspot" and wish to know why that is the case. SVI let's you drill down to themes and individual variables. In a particular area, you may find that socioeconomic status is the most important theme and poverty and unemployment may be the most important single indicators. You will take a closer look at the CDC SVI, and, as with NRI, it is important to have any metadata and data item list handy (open a copy with this link SVI data dictionary [28]).
When we hear about heatwaves, we often focus on weather as the main driver. However, heatwaves are experienced differently in different places due to variation in microclimate related to the build and natural environment.
In addition to broader UHI effects, there is considerable variation in microclimate (e.g., local temperature) related to features of the built environment. In the following thermal image from Los Angeles in Summer 2018, you can clearly see higher temperatures in more built up areas. Major roads, downtown LA, and the Port of Long Beach stand out as hot spots while areas such as Beverly Hills and Santa Monica along the coast are cooler. Note how you can actually see the "hot" road network grid in the area around Anaheim. This illustrates very fine variation in land surface temperatures. A key point to takeaway, is that local conditions can enhance or ameliorate heatwaves e.g., think about the simple example of standing in an open parking lot versus standing under a tree during a heatwave!
Los Angeles Heat Wave. Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory [30]
You will finish off this section by continuing to looking heat health vulnerability in Los Angeles County, California. All of the spatial data are provided in the ArcGIS Pro Project, GEOG_858_Lesson_3.aprx.
Deliverables 2
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The final part of your analysis will focus on an assessment of a some heatwave mitigation options. The first focuses on "green infrastructure" and the role of tree canopy cover in urban cooling. You will then look at the distribution of "Cooling Centers" in LA County and the populations they serve. For both cases, you will use spatial data to assess the current situation and provide analysis and advice on what could be done in the future.
ASTER Los Angeles from Space - Source: NASA JPL [34]
Bi-variate map legend for Heat Health Action Index and Percent No Tree Cover. Note "Both High" indicates areas with low tree cover and high heat health vulnerability |
Many cities now have designated "cool places" people can go during heatwaves. In this part of the exercise, you will look at whether officially designated cool places in LA County [35] provide good coverage of the city, are easily accessible, and how they may be improved.
Deliverable 3
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For the final part of this assignment, you will draw upon the analysis and key points developed in Parts 1, 2, and 3 to write a short briefing document (500 words) for planners and emergency managements in Los Angeles County. This should cover:
Deliverable 4
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For this week's Emerging Theme, you will review the materials below and engage in a Canvas discussion with your classmates - see details below.
Spatial data has traditionally been developed by government agencies and businesses who could afford the technical and financial expenditure necessary to digitize spatial information. Recent advances in web mapping and GPS technology make it possible for tech-savvy volunteers to develop their own spatial datasets. This sort of geographic data is frequently called "Volunteered Geographic Information" or VGI for short. The following short (31 seconds) video below shows the dramatic VGI response to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake through additions and corrections to OpenStreetMap data for the country. Haiti had previously been a poorly-mapped place, and there was an immediate need in the aftermath of the disaster to develop a much better base-map to help recovery efforts. This was a watershed event in VGI for disaster/humanitarian response as discussed by Meier in the first chapter of Digital Humanitarians you read in Lesson 1.
OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti [37] from ItoWorld [38] on Vimeo [39].
One of the most effective VGI efforts can be found at OpenStreetMap.org [40]. OpenStreetMap has the goal of developing a basemap of roads, place names, and other common spatial features for the world, based entirely on volunteered contributions. The OpenStreetMap project aims to provide a completely free worldwide geospatial dataset without any legal or technical restrictions on its use. Most popular web mapping resources like Google Maps or Bing Maps tightly constrain how their data can be manipulated, published, or displayed. Quite a few folks take it for granted that these maps are free, but, in fact, they are only free because those companies are providing access to them right now for free. You are not allowed to re-use and re-purpose those resources or download their data yourself, and if Google decided tomorrow to charge you for access to their maps, you would have no recourse to ensure you kept access for free.
Another important trend in VGI is the use of microtasking or ‘micromapping’ campaigns that split up a big task into small chunks that the VGI community can take on. For example, have a look at the this interesting and useful review of microtasksings role in emergency management from the Australian Institute of Disaster Resilience [41]. In some systems, you are presented with tiles from high-resolution imagery and you are asked to search for and tag features like ‘Trash heaps’, ‘Blocked roads’ and ‘Damaged buildings’. It is worth noting that microtasking like this can also be used to train Machine Learning algorithms to detect these same features with high accuracy. You can read more about this in Chapter 6, ‘Artificial Intelligence in the Sky’, of Digital Humanitarians. This is really cutting-edge stuff that is happening now.
Now, I’d like you to consider VGI with “citizens as sensors”. This is where information relevant to the disaster is collected through devices people are carrying around. I am sure you can think of lots of examples of data you could get from smartphones, but I wanted to highlight a project that started in Japan shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The Safecast [42]team developed small devices for radiation, mapping the results which you can see on the web map here [43]. A very recent example of citizens as sensors is the COVIDSafe App [44] being used in Australia. This is a contract tracing app that records all of the people you come in contact with via Bluetooth on mobile phones. The data are encrypted on your phone and only accessed if someone you came in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.
Finally, for a critical perspective, please look at the recent (2018) paper by Billy Tusker Haworth titled, “Implications of Volunteered Geographic Information for Disaster Management and GIScience: A More Complex World of Volunteered Geography [45]".
This discussion will be graded out of 15 points.
Please see the Discussion Expectations and Grading page under the Orientation and Course Resources module for details.
This week, I will be evaluating the abstracts you developed last week. While I do that, I encourage you to spend some time looking for relevant background information that will help you develop your project. This should include identifying some of the data sources you will need. I am happy to provide suggestions of places to look, but have a go on your own first!
To get started, you could:
Each project will have quite specific needs, so you will need to think of the additional information you will need to write your report.
Some Suggestions...
You do not need to turn anything in for your Term Project this week, but you really should get cracking on your background research. Don't let this time slide by without making some progress on that effort.
If you have questions about how to proceed - you can ask those in the General Questions Discussion in Canvas. It's great if you're able to help a classmate, too, so don't be shy.
In this lesson, we have learned about the first stage of emergency management - vulnerability assessment and hazard mitigation. We focused attention on how geospatial data and tools can be used to conduct risk mapping analyses to identify places where populations and critical infrastructure are vulnerable to disasters.
An effective vulnerability assessment requires answers to the following questions (among others, of course):
When developing geospatial system for emergency management, one must consider the analytical tools and data sources necessary to answer these questions. Often, decision makers need information on potential human and financial losses to make their case for resources to mitigate against disasters.
In the next lesson, we will shift focus toward situations in which a disaster is imminent and geospatial analysis is called upon to help prepare for potential impacts. Even in the best case scenarios, there is often very little warning (and sometimes no warning at all) prior to a disaster, so there is a serious need for efficient and effective geospatial systems to evacuate citizens and stage response resources.
You have reached the end of Lesson 3! Double-check the to-do list on the Lesson 3 Overview page to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed there before you begin Lesson 4.
Links
[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
[2] https://www.fema.gov/flood-maps/tools-resources/risk-map
[3] https://msc.fema.gov/portal/home
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/29/climate/hidden-flood-risk-maps.html
[5] http://www.preventionweb.net/files/3794_ochaidnhazardv4110606.pdf
[6] https://riskfrontiers.com/
[7] https://www.bnhcrc.com.au/resources/poster/3704
[8] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13753-016-0090-9
[9] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog858/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog858/files/Lesson_03/Files/1569-Article%20Text-9619-7-10-20200718.pdf
[10] https://www.youtube.com/@bureauofmeteorology
[11] http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/heatwave/knowledge-centre/heatwave-service.shtml
[12] http://climate.gov
[13] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274699035_Future_Meteorological_Drought_Projections_of_Regional_Climate_Models_for_Europe
[14] https://www.sahealth.sa.gov.au
[15] https://www.sahealth.sa.gov.au/wps/wcm/connect/public+content/sa+health+internet/healthy+living/protecting+your+health/environmental+health/healthy+in+the+heat/heat-related+illness+signs+symptoms+and+treatment
[16] http://https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/extremeheat/index.html
[17] https://ephtracking.cdc.gov/
[18] https://ephtracking.cdc.gov/DataExplorer/
[19] http://ephtracking.cdc.gov/DataExplorer/
[20] https://www.health.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0031/628267/disaster-emergency-incident-plan.pdf
[21] http://www.pean.gov.au/projects/heatwaves-and-health
[22] https://www.pean.gov.au/projects/heatwaves-and-health
[23] https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/
[24] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog858/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog858/files/Lesson_03/Files/fema_national-risk-index_technical-documentation.pdf
[25] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog858/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog858/files/Lesson_03/Files/NRIDataDictionary.csv
[26] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/placeandhealth/svi/index.html
[27] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/placeandhealth/svi/documentation/SVI_documentation_2018.html
[28] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog858/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog858/files/Lesson_03/Files/SVI2018Documentation_01192022_1.pdf
[29] https://www.epa.gov/heatislands/learn-about-heat-islands
[30] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia23786-los-angeles-heat-wave
[31] https://calepa.ca.gov/urban-heat-island-interactive-maps/
[32] https://www.cal-heat.org
[33] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog858/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog858/files/Lesson_03/Files/CHAT_metadata.csv
[34] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia02679-los-angeles-from-space
[35] https://ready.lacounty.gov/heat/
[36] https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/business-analyst/generate-drive-time-trade-area.htm
[37] https://vimeo.com/9182869
[38] https://vimeo.com/itoworld
[39] https://vimeo.com
[40] http://www.openstreetmap.org/
[41] https://knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/ajem-apr-2017-microtasking-redefining-crowdsourcing-practices-in-emergency-management/
[42] https://safecast.org/
[43] http://safecast.org/tilemap/
[44] https://www.health.gov.au/resources/apps-and-tools/covidsafe-app
[45] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog858/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog858/files/Lesson_03/Files/Implications%20of%20Volunteered%20Geographic%20Information%20for%20Disaster%20Management%20and%20GIScience%20A%20More%20Complex%20World%20of%20Volunteered%20Geography.pdf
[46] http://guides.libraries.psu.edu/onlinestudentlibraryguide
[47] https://libraries.psu.edu/
[48] http://scholar.google.com/
[49] http://www.iscram.org/