Abstract:
Natural hazards threaten public safety and economic health nationwide. As people increasingly move to locations that are vulnerable to natural hazards, financial losses from natural hazard events will continue to rise. Community decision-makers and leaders face the challenge of how to plan for and allocate scarce resources to invest in protecting their communities. A well-rounded strategy to ... address the threat of natural hazards should integrate knowledge and techniques from many fields such as geology, hydrology, geography, mathematics, statistics, and economics. Additionally, geographic information systems (GIS) provide a framework and technology in which these disciplines can be combined to solve these types of complex, inherently spatial problems.
Western Region Geography has developed the Land Use Portfolio Model (LUPM), a tool for modeling, mapping, and communicating risk. It is designed to help public agencies and communities understand and reduce their vulnerability to, and risk of, natural hazards. The LUPM is adapted from financial-portfolio theory, a method for evaluating alternative, regional-scale investment possibilities on the basis of their estimated distributions of risk and return. Financial-portfolio theory can be linked with natural-hazard, land use, mitigation and emergency preparedness information to estimate risk to a community from natural disasters at the regional scale and to identify cost-effective pre-disaster risk-reduction policies.
Data inputs include the probability of the hazard event, the planning-time horizon, the assets at risk (e.g. tax parcels), the spatial probabilities of damage, the dollar value and/or vulnerability of each asset, and the cost and effectiveness of the risk-reduction measures being considered. To use the LUPM, the user selects a portfolio of locations and/or measures in which to invest a limited budget for hazard mitigation. Then, for that portfolio, the LUPM calculates estimates for the total cost, number of locations mitigated, return on investment, expected loss, and community wealth retained. Finally, the user can display maps showing the results of each mitigation policy, and compare and rank the policies according to their own priorities.
Ongoing research includes model development for multiple hazards, spatial dependence, and time horizons; decision-support tool software development and strategic planning; and case study applications in southern California, southern Florida, Memphis, and British Columbia, Canada.
Name:
USGS WESTERN PUBLICATIONS GROUP
Phone:
650-329-5057
Contact Address:
U.S. Geological Survey
345 Middlefield Rd, MS 951 City:
Menlo Park
Province or State:
CA
Postal Code:
94025
Country:
USA
Personnel
TYLER
B.
STEVENS Role:
SERF AUTHOR
Phone:
(301) 614-6898
Fax:
301-614-5268
Email:
Tyler.B.Stevens at nasa.gov
Contact Address:
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Global Change Master Directory City:
Greenbelt
Province or State:
MD
Postal Code:
20771
Country:
USA
LAURA
DINITZ Role:
TECHNICAL CONTACT
Phone:
650-329-4953
Email:
ldinitz at usgs.gov
Contact Address:
345 Middlefield Road Mail Stop 531 City:
Menlo Park
Province or State:
CA
Postal Code:
94025
Country:
USA
Extended Metadata Properties
Extraction Date:2013-05-23 23:43:51 The date when the metadata was last extracted from the GCMD system
