Physical Exposure and Social Sensitivity Estimating Sea Level Rise Impacts to Transportation through Vulnerability Assessment and Social Media Analysis [Brief]

Sea level rise, as one of the most wide-spread and important climate change factors, has become a pressing threat to transportation infrastructures, especially in coastal region such as Hawaii. While many research have been conducted to assess the potential impacts and physical vulnerability of transportation network to sea level rise, it is often difficult to validate the results due to the lack of empirical data. This project combines transportation vulnerability assessments with social media analysis and community mapping to understand the potential impacts of sea level rise on transportation and potential adaptive responses

Assessing the Transportation Adaptation Options to Sea Level Rise for Safety Enhancement in RITI Communities through a Structured Decision-Making Framework

Through a structured decision-making framework, this study aims to better understand the key factors influencing transportation adaptation planning in practice. Qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with various stakeholders were conducted to identify the main concerns, challenges, objectives, tradeoffs, and evaluation variables in transportation adaptation planning. Stakeholders were identified through preliminary interviews with transportation planning experts from the metropolitan planning organization using typical case and snowball sampling methods. Key aspects related to the major concerns, objectives, priorities, adaptation plan evaluations, implementation challenges, and potential conflicts and tradeoffs are identified. Major barriers to adaptation plan development and implementation include lack of resources, competing with more urgent needs, conflicts with other planning objectives, lack of holistic view, working in silos, mismatched and outdated information, uncertainty in future scenarios, and action inertia. To overcome these challenges, we propose 1) more efforts to understand community values, develop strategic goals, and identify their priorities in order to balance the tradeoffs 2) collaboration with other sectors to develop a holistic view of resilience and strategic plans that achieve multiple planning goals 3) collaborate with diverse stakeholders to reduce spatial and temporal information mismatches and to create adaptive plans that can accommodate multiple scenarios with uncertainty 4) conduct community outreach and stakeholder engagement from the beginning to build support, consolidate resources, and eliminate social inertia for plan implementation