Enabling Stakeholder Involvement in Coastal Disaster Resilience Planning

Coastal hazards including storm surge, sea-level rise, and cyclone winds continue to have devastating effects on infrastructure systems and communities despite costly investments in risk management. Risk management has generally not been sufficiently focused on coastal resilience, with community stakeholders involved in the process of making their coastline, as a system, more resilient to coastal storms. Thus, without stakeholder earlier involvement in coastal resilience planning for their community, they are frustrated after disasters occur. The U.S. National Academies has defined resilience as "the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events"(National Research Council). This article introduces a methodology for enabling stakeholder-involved resilience discussions across physical, information, cognitive, and social domains. The methodology addresses the stages of resilience-prepare, absorb, recover, and adapt-and integrates performance assessment with scenario analysis to characterize disruptions of risk-management priorities. The methodology is illustrated through a case study at Mobile Bay, Alabama, USA.