Home and High Water

Neighborhood Climate Resilience, Part 1: “Things Are Changing”

• FAU Center for Environmental Studies • Season 1 • Episode 1

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In a rapidly changing climate, being able to map and quantify the vulnerability and resilience of a community is critical because it is often the first picture decision-makers have of an area, shaping vital policy decisions from hazard preparation to response. 

This week, we launch Part 1 of a 2-part series exploring the resilience assessment that enables us to understand a community’s capacity to respond to hazards in one South Florida neighborhood. In Part 1, we learn about the resilience assessments that provide a crucial foundation to our understanding of community vulnerability and resilience.

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Neighborhood Climate Resilience, Part 1: “Things Are Changing” 


 Leslie Kevles: Things are changing, I see weather is becoming more intense, and every year I see a little bit more. People here have told me, that are here more than 20 years, they have never seen the water in the locations that it is right now and the height that it is right now. This is the most we have ever seen here.         
                  

Dr. Colin Polsky: And so, if we don't dive in deep with the people at the people scale, you know, households and neighborhood then we would be left with making policy recommendations on the basis of these data products that we don't know how well they actually reflect what's going on the ground.  

Jan Booher: The piece that's missing is that it doesn't track ingenuity. It doesn't track innovation. It doesn't track people who have gotten together and are willing to work on something for the betterment of their community. And that is the genius of the community, and that is not being tracked.      

Bridget Huston: And I think, you know, bringing a voice and a story; multiple stories, multiple voices to the data helps to personalize resilience and Broward County as a whole, and not just kind of bucket everyone into the same grouping.   
                                                       

Cameron Peters: Welcome to Home and High Water, a podcast by the Center for Environmental Studies at Florida Atlantic University about research that uncovers how we live, adapt, and thrive in a changing climate. I’m your host, Cameron Peters.         

You are walking in the dark with a flashlight, but your mental map of the community is so clear, you don’t really need the flashlight. Maybe it’s your neighborhood, your workplace, or another place that you can not only walk through blindfolded while not missing a step, but know exactly who to find if a challenge arises.                  

How would you create a map of that community for someone new? It is also night. They have a flashlight. They probably need to know the physical geography, how to get from point A to B. But, is that all? What are the characteristics and networks of that place that are beyond the naked eye?                    

Understanding the social dynamics of a community: the people, their connections, interactions, strengths, and struggles, adds necessary texture to our map of a place. Without this on-the-ground information, without knowing what’s beyond a single flashlight’s beam of focus, our understanding of a place is incomplete.                    

In a rapidly changing climate, being able to map and quantify the vulnerability and resilience of a community is critical because it is often the first picture decision makers have of an area, shaping vital policy decisions from hazard preparation to response. To better understand and document the composite of a particular community, we need more complex and individualized information at the neighborhood level.

This week, we launch part-1 of a 2-part series exploring the resilience assessment that enables us to understand a community’s capacity to respond to hazards in one South Florida neighborhood and what a research team discovered when they began to shine the flashlight in new directions. In part 1, we learn about the resilience assessments that provide a crucial foundation to our understanding of community vulnerability and resilience. In part 2, we see what happens when we go deeper, collecting information at the community level.                   

  

[Music break]               

        

Bridget Huston: My name's Bridget Huston. I'm a graduate research assistant at the Center for Environmental Studies at FAU. And I've been there for about two and a half years now, working on community resilience projects and research that take place here in Broward County, Florida.         

          

Cameron Peters: Bridget spent her childhood in the South Florida ocean and mangroves investigating what was above and below the surface. This fascination led her directly into the natural sciences, exploring the physical environments she had spent her childhood uncovering. But, after graduating from university with a degree in ecology and conservation, she knew something was missing.         

 

Bridget Huston: When I graduated and tried to enter the workforce, it became very clear that, you know, there was a bigger picture going on and there always seemed to be kind of an element that I hadn't studied or kind of wasn't really aware of. And, you know, that would kind of refer to the like social aspect of environmentalism. So kind of the people that make up the environment, not just the physical environment themselves. So I think that just kind of realizing that that was a big piece of this puzzle in my career and in my evolution of, you know, my work, I got to open my eyes to like the different communities around where I live and how they're being disproportionately impacted by different climate events. Especially down here in South Florida with hurricanes, you know, just seeing how a hurricane would roll through and, you know, one community down in Southeast Florida, you know, maybe would be fine and, you know, would bounce back super-fast and then maybe on the panhandle, they would be experiencing those impacts for months. So just kind of having the academia background of knowing these things exist, but then actually seeing them on the home front catapulted me to make this my career.                 


Cameron Peters: Pursuing a graduate degree at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Environmental Studies, also referred to as CES, Bridget joined the lab of Dr. Colin Polsky, CES’ director and a professor of geosciences at FAU. As a geographer and climate social scientist, Dr. Polsky works at the intersection of the physical and social environments.   

  

Dr. Colin Polsky: Climate change is a threat multiplier, so to speak. And so anyone who's kind of living their daily lives where the thumb's kind of firmly on the scale against them to begin with before the climate change is considered, is going to experience climate change as probably a threat multiplier in their lives.              

  

Cameron Peters: What Bridget was observing around her – communities exposed to the same storm, yet ultimately feeling its impact in dramatically different ways – began to spark new questions for her, shaping into a master’s thesis.            

 

Bridget Huston: So are there certain characteristics that are helping a community fare against a changing climate? Are there characteristics that are making it more susceptible? We wanted to see how this characterization compares to and even goes beyond the current methods that are out there right now.     

 

Cameron Peters: In Fall 2019, Bridget and Dr. Polsky designed a new project.      

 

Dr. Colin Polsky: The two main concepts that drove our motivation to do the work in and with the people of the Estates of Fort Lauderdale are vulnerability, and then what we might think of as the flip side or the other side to the coin of vulnerability, and that is what we call resilience.                 

   

Cameron Peters: Vulnerability and Resilience. In hazard research, vulnerability is likelihood of harm or damage and is shaped by three factors: your physical exposure to a hazard, your susceptibility to that hazard, and your ability to respond to the hazard.  


Resilience takes a different perspective by encompassing a community’s capacity to prepare for and respond to a hazard. As Bridget explained, resilience is “those characteristics that are really working to the advantage of the community to help them protect and safeguard not only the community itself, but the people within the community.” Importantly, resilience doesn’t just open the door to understanding how a community can ‘bounce back’ from a stress such as a natural hazard. It also opens the door to understanding how a community can ‘bounce forward,’ so that when the next stress occurs, the community is in a better position to face the stress. 

         

Bridget Huston: So we have these two terms that kind of oppose each other, but at the same time, we'll work together to create this kind of tapestry of how hazards are impacting communities and communities are interacting with hazards. 


Dr. Colin Polsky: So once we have the idea of vulnerability and the allied concept of resilience in mind, that begs the question of, well, where do you see it? Where can you see places that are vulnerable or are resilient, and that presupposes an ability to measure? That in turn suggests, well, what kind of data do we have? And so there's this ongoing struggle in the literature between what kind of data we need and what kind of data we have.  

  

Cameron Peters: Historically, environmental hazard studies have determined an area's vulnerability and resilience based on assessments that utilize readily available data, such as from the US Census, like the Social Vulnerability Index, known as SoVi, and a related assessment called Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities, coined BRIC. Beginning with both of these assessments offered an important foundation, one we will return to in a little bit, because they are extremely helpful in identifying areas of potential high concern and in pinpointing populations in need of greater resource flow and mitigation efforts. 


Bridget Huston: These sorts of assessments and metrics really helped to kind of lay the land and kind of you know, serve as the foundation for my study, they really help to paint a picture of the composition of the area. So who's living in these areas? What does the physical environment look like in these areas? What kind of resources are available? And the resilience dimensions of my project were actually based on the concepts of BRIC. So I basically took the resilience types and the variables from BRIC and then kind of, you know, adapted them and tailored them to Broward County. So which variables, you know, do resonate with Broward County communities, which don't, how do we push these further and how do we kind of evolve them to dig a little deeper and represent just a bit more of, you know, the composition of our actual local communities?

    

Cameron Peters: And that's where this project offered to go deeper, to explore what new information could be collected and how that might contribute to a community’s climate resilience story.  

 

Bridget Huston: So the project basically looks at characterizing resilience to environmental hazards within Broward County, Florida communities. So when I say environmental hazards, I'm referring to kind of a big group of different climate events. So hurricanes, sunny day flooding, severe wind events, severe heat events. And we were basically just trying to kind of hone in on those different elements and characteristics of places and people and communities within Broward County and kind of how they work together to either help communities, you know, be more resilient against these climate hazards or maybe make them a bit more susceptible and just kind of to paint that tapestry of the area at a really localized, personal level. 

 

Cameron Peters: To study the impact of a changing climate within the community, Bridget and Dr. Polsky carefully chose seven major resilience dimensions to examine before collecting the data. These dimensions, inspired by BRIC, included communication, knowledge, social capital, mobility, infrastructure, institutional efforts and financial independence. Bridget hoped to discover what was making a local neighborhood more and less resilient to climate change through a community-level assessment.

    

However, before this project could begin, they had to find a community to collaborate with.     


Dr. Colin Polsky: And so we partnered with a local activist and scientist named Jan Booher who helped us find a community where we could experiment with our ideas that ended up being captured by Bridget's thesis.            


Cameron Peters: Jan Booher is Director of Community Engagement and Training for Resilient American Communities, an initiative of Health Initiatives Foundation, Inc., President of Heron Bridge Education, LLC, Director of Unitarian Universalist Justice Florida’s Climate Resilience Ministry, and an External Research Coordinator with FAU. Her expertise in community resilience and bridge building between researchers and local communities paved the way for relationship development and growth throughout the study. Having worked with a wide range of communities across Florida, Jan has noticed shared experiences.   


Jan Booher: The most common thread is that there are people who are expressing a plague of some sort, something that's bothering them and they're expressing it in very colloquial terms. You know, it didn't use to flood on the playground and now every time that it rains, it's a swimming pool down there, or the you know, we didn't use to ever have anything coming up out of the storm drains, but they spit now. And I can hear it when I walk by that it comes up and then when it rains, it really comes out on the street. So they're not associating these things with climate change at all, but they're very bothered by them and they are trying to find solutions to them. And that's usually the way things are when I come into a community. Also people have stories about the difficulties they've had in heat waves. People have been trapped perhaps in the upper levels, upper stories of a building, and they had to be carried down because there was no way to get an elevator that was powered. They had to be carried down on somebody's back because it was too hot up there, that sort of a thing. And they're not associating it necessarily with climate change writ large.  

 

Cameron Peters: In collaboration with Jan, Dr. Polsky and Bridget began to search for that community partnership.             


Bridget Huston: So the selection process for the community was kind of twofold. On the front end, we did do a spatial analysis where we kind of inputted different criteria that are used in a lot of common assessments to pinpoint vulnerable areas in the research field. So those were criteria such as income and age and infrastructure. And this process did kind of view the Estates of Fort Lauderdale community as being more vulnerable than other communities within the area. So that kind of geared us towards this community to just kind of put out feelers and see if they'd be interested, but it was actually, I would say the Estates of Fort Lauderdale kind of chose us almost, just because within our first interaction, we had an instant kind of connection. They seemed extremely interested and concerned. It just felt very real to them, I guess is how I would say it. Like the moment we got there, bringing up the conversation, they had a lot of different things to say, they wanted to tell their story. They wanted to show us different areas in the community. So it just felt like they were invested in a way that we were invested and they were really interested in seeing how this partnership could, you know, help them protect their neighbors and their community members. They're really tight knit groups. So I think that it just kind of naturally evolved into this partnership.

 

Cameron Peters: To figure out what resilience and vulnerability generally looked like within The Estates of Fort Lauderdale, Dr. Polsky and Bridget used SoVi and BRIC, the two commonly employed tools that draw on data collected from the census to create a separate vulnerability and resilience score.   

   

Bridget Huston: You can basically think of it as, you know, putting groups of variables and parameters into a blender, I guess, and then whatever comes out, so your final smoothie or whatnot is that one combined single metric of either vulnerability or resilience. You know, that's such a great place to start because there is so much raw data out there, but, you know, data can only take you so far when it's produced at these kind of bigger scales. Especially if you're trying to be hyper focused and hyper localized at a community range.    

  

Cameron Peters: The census data is powerful because it is reliable and can give you a big picture, incorporating values for household income, individual age and education attainment. For example, for a category like age, an older resident might be considered more at risk because they are less able to escape a dangerous situation. However, this might not always hold true. Strong social networks can add a critical layer of resilience. In addition, ‘high education’ as measured by college or graduate degrees is often taken to correlate with hazard resilience. But the training one needs to prepare for or respond to hazards may not be part of university curricula. Instead, electrical, plumbing, nursing, or carpentry skills may be the key for resilience success.

  

Dr. Colin Polsky: The SOVI and BRIC and the other products basically point us to, for a neighborhood like the Estates raising an alarm about the vulnerability of such a place, because it's composed mostly of people who are senior citizens who may not have the highest formal level of education who may not be the wealthiest in the County, and also who tend to live in mobile homes. All of those factors from the statistical analysis are taken to be indicators of vulnerability. And what we found is working on the ground, a more nuanced reality.        

 

Cameron Peters: In investigating, for example, a generalized category like education, Dr. Polsky and Bridget found a more complex perspective of resilience.       

 

Dr. Colin Polsky: Sure. If, you know, you're quite old and maybe infirmed, you're less mobile and less able to react to a flood or a wind event that makes sense. And yes, if you're in a mobile home, certainly one that's not relatively new, then it's probably not built to withstand strong winds. So that's not such a good thing, but those things we can put to the side for the moment on the question of education and on the question of income which tend to be correlated, we found that those aren't necessarily reasons for concern on the kind of vulnerability resilience spectrum. Instead, we found that education is kind of independent. So one's education basically, what's the highest level you finished high school, some college, college, graduate school, that type of scale, which is what you find in the census is really at least in this case study independent of knowledge and also smarts. And you know, what you need to be adaptable and resilient is knowledge and smarts and motivation. And so education just turned out to be not as helpful and perhaps counterproductive if we had just taken it at face value and not spoken with the community.


Cameron Peters: General vulnerability mapping of the Estates of Fort Lauderdale places them in a higher vulnerability category.  


Bridget wanted to dig deeper: to uncover and figure out if what was happening at the community level was reflected in this categorization, and if the addition of other measurable components might reveal a more nuanced and accurate picture of resilience, one not initially visible using census data alone.      


Dr. Colin Polsky: So we were trying to learn with them and from them, what factors lead them to be, in their own opinions, more or less exposed to wind and flood, more or less sensitive to wind and flood, and more or less adaptable to wind and flood.      

   

Cameron Peters: To do this work, the research team needed to not only develop an assessment tool wherein a more nuanced picture of resilience could be captured, but also a method where on the ground data collection could be conducted in collaboration with the residents.     


Cameron Peters: Next time on Home and High Water...how a more nuanced assessment of community resilience offers a springboard to new ways forward.

 

Jan Booher: If you really want to know what's going on, you have to consult the wisdom of place that's held by people who have lived in a place over time.

 

Leslie Kevles (0:24:29): And so my fear is when a storm comes, will I make it through that storm? I can't do anything to stop it, that's my problem, I can't control it. My kids used to call me the fixer. I would fix things to avoid them if we knew something was happening. I'm helpless here. I'm at the mercy of mother nature.  


Jan Booher: So I would say if you look at community vulnerability as the aggregate of individual vulnerabilities, then you're mistaken because very often it is the group or groups within a community that really hold the resilience. 



Home and High Water is produced, edited, and hosted by Cameron Peters. Additional script editing by Bridget Huston. Music and Sound Design by Miles Shebar. This episode was engineered by Andrew Perelman. Theme music by Shane Wells. Special thanks to Jan Booher, Leslie Kevles, CES Director and FAU Professor Dr. Colin Polsky, and CES Research Coordinator Kimberly Vardeman.           

You can follow Home and High Water on Twitter and Facebook @CESatFAU. You can email us at ces@fau.edu.