Risks of Resilience: How Losses from Natural Hazards Drive Urbanization and Vice Versa

• In Event: 298 - Section on Environment and Technology Paper Session. Environment and Development (co-sponsored with Section on Sociology of Development)

Abstract

Urbanization is a socio-environmental process that requires not only material development of local landscapes but also adaptation to endemic natural hazards. Prior research has highlighted each of these dynamics but left their intersection largely ignored. The present study helps to fill this gap by using data on local economic losses from natural hazards and data on local land development to examine how the two entwine successively over time to contribute to the physical expansion of U.S. metropolitan areas. Results from panel regression and structural equation models provide evidence of such feedback and suggest how the adaptive capacities of urban areas actually work to increase future exposure and economic losses from natural hazards. The implication is that costly natural disasters do not slow or impede local processes of urbanization but rather help to feed them, and vice versa.

Authors

• James R. Elliott, Rice University

• Matthew Thomas Clement, University of Oregon

• Jessica A. Schultz, University of Oregon