M. Buchanan, K. Chowdhary, H. Li, S. Lorenz, F. Menendez, G. Treuer

Visualizing Impacts of Combined EventsA study in Southeast Florida

Motivation

• Region of Focus: Southeast Florida ( Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe, Palm Beach Counties)

• Why? Florida is considered one of the most vulnerable coastal areas to climate change, especially sea level rise. BUT, there is currently insufficient joint stakeholder action on adaptation.

Objective and Goal

• Objective: – Identify together with multi-jurisdictional stakeholders of

Southeast Florida combined impacts of two or more climate and non-climate hazards happening simultaneously or in short succession.

– Facilitate greater regional collaboration across jurisdictional boundaries to increase stakeholders’ adaptive capacity.

• Goal: – Create an easy-to-use framework to identify joint impacts

of hazards and highlight current strengths and weaknesses of multiple stakeholders relating to adaptation.

How do we do this?

• We will set up a network graph to identify the joint relationship between both climate and non- climate hazards and their resultant impacts.

• We will use different scenarios of probabilities • We can use these different levels of probabilities to

illustrate and identify different impact scenarios• Using conditional probabilities, we can create a

Bayesian network. – We can use this to determine the most important

hazards, and sensitivities to different hazards.

Who will be involved?• City, County, and Tribal governments• State agencies

– DOT, DEP, SFWMD, FDEM• Federal agencies

– FEMA, National Parks, etc.• Military

– Reserves, Coast Guard, 3 main branches• Industry

– Energy, Transportation, Telecommunications• Academics• NGOs

– Everglades Law Center, Sierra Club, AARP, Vice Squad

More on the Network

• Stakeholders will get together with modelers, statisticians, climate scientists and social scientist to determine the most relevant hazards and impacts (starting from a high level view for a particular sector), and considering what data is available.

• Network allows division of labor by subdividing the nodes into areas such as social, physical or structural hazards/ impacts.

Example

HURRICANE TIDAL FLOODING

SEVERE PROPERTY DAMAGE

Example with joint effect

HURRICANE TIDAL FLOODING

SEVERE PROPERTY DAMAGE

A more complicated example

HURRICANE TIDAL FLOODING

SEVERE PROPERTY DAMAGE

SEA LEVEL RISE

ROAD DAMAGE

Things to consider…• One of the hardest tasks will be to sit down with stakeholders,

decision and policy makers, modelers, and mathematicians to come up with a practical event-impact network– Most likely will be an iterative process that can be sub-divided into

smaller groups. – We can create different levels of networks that emphasize

different scales of events. • The next hardest part will be to conceptualize different scenarios of

potential probabilities of hazards and their joint impact. – We may not have enough information to make a qualified guess

(missing data)– Model might be too simple, or, on the opposite spectrum, the

model can quickly become too complex.