Evaluating Coastal Failure

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Research objective 3: Evaluating the coastal vulnerability to sea level rise and hurricane for the coupled human and nature system under consistent or even increasing urban growth process.
Question 3.1: How to define the vulnerability in the coupled human and nature system?
Based on the vulnerability conceptual framework in Turner (2007), three general components, namely exposure, sensitivity and resilience are considered. With the first two components considered separately for nature and human subsystems, the resilience should be quantified based on the past disturbances. As the vulnerability is quite context-specific, more detailed conditions of the local coastal area should be considered for a useful and meaningful result. The selected area in this study is Lee County and Collier County in southwest Florida, US. This region is tourism-driven and less managed as a sailing division since 1950s. It shows an obscure boundary of urban, suburban and rural landscape. The dominant low-density, single-family houses with large canal lots along the coast represent a low resistance to storm surge and hurricane wind. Population growth and the associated construction activities will skyrocket in the
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MCDA is developed to ease the decision making process through a series of actions including clarifying evaluation criteria, and defining values for decision situation. With GIS providing data processing, manipulating and visualization functions, stakeholders could easily look at the criteria data to enhance their judgment and confidence. Analytical hierarchical process (AHP) will be used to optimize weighting system of the final result. All the data will be changed to raster for further calculation. A GIS model builder will be used to generate vulnerably maps automatically based on received weights from

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