The Production of Unequal Vulnerability to Flood Hazards in Metro Vancouver, Canada

Flood risk is a growing concern in Canada’s cities. Residents of these cities have differential risk according to their unique vulnerability and exposure to flood hazards. Factors related to societal structural forces, human agency, and place interact to produce vulnerability to hazards. Analysis of the factors that influence vulnerability will lead to a better understanding of how unequal vulnerability to hazards is produced among residents of a city. This dissertation investigates the factors that influence vulnerability to flood hazards in a Canadian coastal urban region, Metro Vancouver. It develops and applies a conceptual framework for looking across scales and across actors to identify and situate the factors that influence vulnerability. The study uses multiple research methods to investigate these factors, including statistical analysis of population data, focus groups with municipal practitioners, a practitioner survey, a residential survey, and informal interviews with residents. The investigation centres on what I refer to as indicators and determinants of vulnerability, and how they interact to produce vulnerability. Social vulnerability is identified as an important determinant of vulnerability, and indicators of social vulnerability are tested with an index of population data at the neighbourhood scale. A participatory process illustrates that the input of municipal flood managers can be used to make a quantitative assessment of social vulnerability more meaningful to those working in local policy and reveals findings about how practitioners view vulnerability in their community. Institutional arrangements such as development regulations and property insurance are found to be another key determinant that influences vulnerability. The availability of overland flood insurance, as an institutional arrangement were it to be introduced in Canada, would have implications for residential vulnerability and the current regime of public flood management. Institutional arrangements appear to interact with social vulnerability and other determinants to allow some groups of people to live in hazardous places without taking on the full associated risk. The findings of the study offer insights to what produces vulnerability and how, or whether, policy measures can address these factors to equitably reduce risk

Citizen participation in post-disaster flood hazard mitigation planning: Exploring strategic choices in Peterborough, Ontario

This thesis explores the role of citizen participation in a post-disaster flood hazard mitigation planning program in Peterborough, Ontario. Recognizing that citizen participation is an integral element of hazards mitigation planning, a review of the relevant literature identifies six strategic planning choices that should be considered in the design of a citizen participation program. The study applies this framework to the Flood Reduction Master Plan (FRMP) study and planning process in Peterborough, undertaken following the July 2004 flood event, to analyze citizen participation in hazard mitigation planning practice. Existing documentation, including the FRMP, and fifteen key informant interviews provided the main sources of research data. Data were analyzed in terms of the framework and other hazards mitigation theory found in the literature to produce the findings of the study. There existed many strengths and several weaknesses of the citizen participation aspect of the planning program. Many of the decisions made regarding citizen participation in the FRMP process can be considered successful by the standards set in the literature

Willingness of residents to invest in flood mitigation measures and to purchase flood insurance

Approximately 12,000 people live in the flood risk areas in Finland. New flood risk management plans were prepared for 21 areas as a part of the EU Floods Directive in 2015. In connection with this work, we conducted a survey in three flood risk areas in 2014. The total number of recipients was 4,710 and the response rate 39%. The study provided an indication of how local citizens perceive flood risk, and specifically whether they have already invested or would be willing to invest in private flood mitigation measures or to purchase flood insurance. We also examined how previous personal experiences of flooding affected their responses. The questionnaires were georeferenced in GIS and compared with flood hazard maps on a detailed scale. Over 27% of the respondents had experienced a recent flooding event, but only 9% had implemented flood mitigation measures and 10% knew that flood coverage was included in their insurance. A young age and having property at risk of flooding increased the willingness of respondents to consider implementing flood protection measures and purchasing flood insurance

Connecting coastal communities to share knowledge and resources for marine hazard risk reduction: HVSI online platform

Numerous quantitative indices have been developed for measuring the vulnerability of communities to natural hazards. However, such indicator-based approaches are typically used for identifying highly vulnerable communities to assist in resource prioritization. This study developed a new approach to use vulnerability indicators to identify places that are similarly vulnerable, rather than the most vulnerable communities. The premise is that learning from other communities’ experiences and practices to reduce disaster vulnerability is important for fostering local and regional resilience. The approach aims to promote connections between communities that are similarly vulnerable to coastal hazards. To identify similar communities, the Hazard Vulnerability Similarity Index (HVSI) was developed, which quantifies similarity in terms of a series of 25 indicators that characterizes the communities’ economic, social, built-environment, natural environment, and institutional capital. As a pilot application, the HVSI is applied to 50 most populous communities in the Strait of Georgia region. To ensure the relevance and usability of the work, we hosted a workshop to engage over 30 practitioners involved in vulnerability reduction efforts in the region to refine the selection of indicators and the design of an online platform. The result is made accessible to communities in the platform. While the data for many indicators are from publicly available sources, the data for the institutional capital indicators was mostly collected through a survey with officials of the study communities. Besides identifying communities that are similarly vulnerable to the community of interest, the user can also find out what vulnerability reduction actions those communities has taken in the platform’s community profiles. Therefore the platform aims to promote network building and knowledge and resource sharing in the region. This talk will highlight our participatory processes during the development of the HVSI platform, its specific features, and the preliminary results on platform usage

Universal or context-specific social vulnerability drivers – Understanding flood preparedness in southern Poland

Social vulnerability assessments rely on two approaches: case studies of at-risk populations and geospatial models using census data. Various authors have proposed that the design of quantitative analyses could benefit from the results of qualitative research. This expectation comes from an assumption that the nature of social vulnerability drivers is universal. Regarding this hypothesis as dubious, the authors embarked upon testing whether different geographic, historical, social and economic settings would produce similar sets of indicators explaining social vulnerability to floods, thus justifying the application of such variables in generalised spatial models. After theoretical considerations, the authors selected demographics and the socio-economic status as two groups of variables covering potential drivers of social vulnerability influencing the flood preparedness of the households involved in the study. The model includes control variables addressing prior flood experience and flood risk perception. The data was obtained from a survey of 726 households in eight research areas of southern Poland selected to provide a good variety of post-disaster communities based on several criteria. The results confirm that preparedness behavior of communities at risk is influenced by context-specific social and economic factors that cannot be generalised. Among these factors the ones that represented human and social capital came out to be significant drivers in the highest number of cases regardless of the demographic makeup of the household. However, the number one flood preparedness driver in terms of both the significance level and consistency was the sense of agency and the ability to mitigate flood damage, which reflected the respondent households’ motivational vulnerability