Title
Assessment of vulnerability and adaptive capacity to coastal hazards in the Caribbean Region
Date Issued
01 April 2014
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Lam N.
Brito P.
Liu K.
University of Burgundy
Publisher(s)
Coastal Education Research Foundation Inc.
Abstract
It has been documented that given the same type of climate related hazard and degree of exposure, the vulnerability of a region to the hazard and its resultant damages could be very different, depending on a number of natural and socioeconomic factors. An understanding of the factors contributing to the vulnerability of a region requires a good assessment method. This paper reports the results of a vulnerability assessment to hurricane hazards for the countries in the Caribbean region. The resultant index is a weighted combination of variables. The paper demonstrates a methodology to validate the weights of the variables used to compute the index through regression analysis with the storm damage data. The refined vulnerability indices for the 25 countries studied were found to range from 0.31 to 0.77. Small island countries were generally more vulnerable than large countries, with the highest vulnerability indices (>0.6) found in The Bahamas, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Turks and Caicos Is. Although the hurricane exposure was originally considered a key variable contributing to high vulnerability, low adaptive capacity in the form of low socioeconomic status, high electricity consumption, and low infrastructure development were found to have a higher weight contributing to the overall vulnerability index.
Start page
473
End page
478
Volume
70
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ciencias del medio ambiente
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-84938967394
PubMed ID
Source
Journal of Coastal Research
ISSN of the container
07490208
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus