Assessing Seismic Social Vulnerability in Urban Centers — the Case-Study of Nablus,Palestine

ABSTRACT

Seismic risk depends on three factors: seismic hazard, exposure of assets and communities, and vulnerability—physical and social. Whereas hazard and exposure are harder to act upon, vulnerability can be significantly reduced, if properly characterized for each asset, population, or society in general. This article assesses the social vulnerability and resilience level of the city of Nablus, an important urban center in Palestine. The region, considerably exposed to seismic hazard, features, from the in-built view point, very recent or very old historical buildings, without seismic design provisions. On the socio-economic side, the well-known political conflicts and societal challenges are key vulnerability factors. The method employed was based on Social Vulnerability Indicators (SoVI) extracted from census data, integrated with the more recent SCORECARD approach, which was applied to the urban community of Nablus. The goal was both to obtain an overall vulnerability score for the city and to characterize internal differences among its main areas, connected to its historical urban expansion and patterns. The results show that both physical and social vulnerability can be related and that the city development patterns can mirror the relative social vulnerability.     

Vulnerability to climate change hazards and risks: crop and flood insurance

This paper reviews the widely used concepts of risk and vulnerability as they relate to climate and weather hazards, re‐conceptualizes these terms in the context of climate change and illustrates this development using crop and flood insurance as examples. Government subsidization of insurance against risks associated with adverse climatic conditions and weather events, such as flood damage and crop loss, may lead to individual decisions that actually increase the susceptibility of people, property and economic activities to those risks. The processes that give rise to this phenomenon are important in understanding the vulnerability of human populations to climate change. In many regions, existing conditions that give rise to flooding or crop failure are likely to be exacerbated by climate change over coming decades. In the climate change field, vulnerability has been conceptualised as a function of exposure to risk and as an ability to adapt to the effects. In this context, crop and flood insurance are possible adaptive measures. This treatment of vulnerability compares with similar concepts in insurance and risk management whereby events that cause loss are known as perils, and physical conditions, such as climate change, that increase the likelihood of a peril occurring, are known as physical hazards. Human behaviour that increases the exposure of individuals to potential perils is known as morale hazard or moral hazard, depending on the intentions of the person. Vulnerability consequently becomes a function of hazard and responses taken to reduce risk. Examples of crop and flood insurance programs from Canada, New Zealand and the U.S. are used to show how subsidized insurance might create a morale hazard in addition to physical hazards such as short‐term weather events and long‐term climate change, resulting in a higher level of vulnerability than would otherwise exist. These findings demonstrate that human behaviour affects the formation of both exposure and adaptive capacity in the context of vulnerability to climate change. Responses taken to increase adaptive capacity may in some cases be offset by individual behaviour that increases exposure.     

‘Are we wasting our time?’: bushfire practitioners and flammable futures in northern Australia

Humans are ‘fire creatures’ that have used fire for millennia to shape local environments to diverse purposes. Our capacity for combustion has also forced global climatic changes and rendered the planet increasingly flammable, creating the conditions for progressively higher impact bushfires now and into the future. Meanwhile, governments in fire-prone countries such as Australia have continued to allow settlements to be established (and re-established) in wildland–urban interfaces. Like other ‘natural hazards’, bushfire is thereby a social phenomenon bound up with human values, practices and decisions. But, while studies of the social dimensions of ‘natural hazards’ are steadily rising, this scholarship has rarely addressed natural hazard management practitioners directly, precisely those authorised and entrusted to intervene in the distribution of hazard probabilities and consequences. This paper seeks to help remediate this research gap, illustrating how cultural, ecological, economic and political factors thoroughly condition hazard management and modes of intervention. Drawing on a case study in the Northern Territory’s Greater Darwin region, this paper suggests not only that examining such sociocultural realities provides new insights into hazards and their distribution, but also that attention to such issues is crucial to understanding our flammable future in the Anthropocene.     

Improving Coastal Vulnerability Assessment Methodologies for Integrated Coastal Zone Management: an Approach from South Australia

The global concern about human-induced climatic change and its potential effect on sea-level has dominated the debate on coastal vulnerability, particularly since a common assessment methodology was developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1991. There have been numerous attempts to use or adapt this methodology but the focus has remained on sea-level rise as the single most important issue for coastal vulnerability. This paper presents a revised and more holistic coastal vulnerability assessment methodology which incorporates spatial and temporal scales relevant to the predicted impacts of climatic change and current human-induced hazards. Three studies in contrasting coastal environments of South Australia demonstrate that there are significant regional variations in sea-level response, human-induced hazards and local planning issues and that these may present a greater immediate threat than the possibility of sea-level rise.     

Investigating Private Motorised Travel and Vehicle Fleet Efficiency: Using New Data and Methods to Reveal Socio‐Spatial Patterns in Brisbane,Australia

Australian cities have seen continued long‐term growth in private motor vehicle travel that has imposed increasing vehicle energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper investigates the spatial patterns of vehicle energy consumption on urban areas through an analysis of vehicle travel and of vehicle fleet efficiency in Brisbane, Australia. This is achieved by combining motor vehicle registration records and Australian government's ‘Green Vehicle Guide’ of vehicle fuel efficiency database. The results of a spatial analysis of the private vehicle trip distances derived from journey to work data and fuel energy consumption associated with the private‐owned vehicles decomposed to local areas show that private vehicle energy use tends to increase with increasing distance from the city centre (e.g. central business district). This analysis demonstrates that differences in vehicle trip distances and lower proportions of high‐efficiency vehicles in the outer suburbs aggravate vehicle energy consumption in those locations. The paper further compares vehicle energy use results for Brisbane against spatial patterns of suburban socio‐economic disadvantage. The paper demonstrates that access to vehicle fleet technology may compound other forms of socio‐economic disadvantage and vulnerability.     

Development of a Methodology for the Assessment of Vulnerability Related to Wildland Fires Using a Multi‐Criteria Evaluation

In the geography of risk, vulnerability may be defined as a physical characteristic that describes the tendency of a territory to suffer damage as a result of the occurrence of certain phenomena. According to this synthetic definition, there are two main components of vulnerability in the context of wildland fires. The first is internal, and is related to the effects of fires on the value of the affected assets affected and their capacity for recovery. The second is external, and is related to the characteristics of fires and the ability of society to deal with the hazards of wildland fires. The aim of the present study is to develop an assessment of spatial vulnerability in the context of wildland fires, at a scale appropriate for planning (1/25 000), in a mountainous region of the Spanish Mediterranean coast (Sierra Calderona). The proposed methodology entailed the definition of a synthetic index associated with the management of the risk of wildland fires, which was made up of significant factors such as the difficulty of extinction, the need for forest defence, the need for civil protection, and territorial value. To define and calculate the factors, variables and indicators that reflected aspects of the components of vulnerability (such as exposure, sensitivity, and the capacity to fight fires) were used. These were combined in a hierarchical structure, each having its own cartographical representation. Geographical information systems and multi‐criteria evaluation were then used to provide a successful framework for the analysis of vulnerability in relation to wildland fires. The cartographical outputs of the various components of the index are of particular interest to the planning of certain activities (e.g. forest, wildland fire, and civil protection), all of which are directly involved in the management of risk. In turn, the final synthetic index provides comprehensive spatial information that is useful for spatial planning and also enables the assessment of potential future land use in view of its usefulness in simulations.     

Exploring the associations between cooling centre accessibility and marginalization in Montreal,Toronto, and Vancouver,Canada

Cooling centres provide respite, safety, and social support during extreme heat events for populations that do not have the resources to own or operate in-home air conditioning. The objective of this study was to measure the spatial accessibility of cooling centres and analyze the associations between cooling centre access and marginalization in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, Canada. The potential spatial accessibility of cooling centres within a 15-minute walk was measured at the dissemination area scale using the two-step floating catchment area method. A two-stage modelling approach was used to analyze the associations between cooling centre access and marginalization. Approximately 62%, 58%, and 54% of the populations in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver had access to at least one cooling centre. In Montreal and Vancouver, high marginalization areas were more likely to have cooling centre access than low marginalization areas. Of the areas with cooling centre access, smaller access scores were observed in areas with high residential instability. Approximately one-fifth of the areas in each city had no cooling centre access and high marginalization, and may be considered for future cooling centres or programs that improve accessibility to existing centres.     

Imizamo Yethu: a Case Study of Community Resilience to Fire Hazard in an Informal Settlement Cape Town,South Africa

Imizamo Yethu, in Cape Town, is one of the many informal settlements in South Africa's post-Apartheid urban landscape. Residents live in abject poverty and are potentially vulnerable to a range of environmental hazards, of which fire hazard is one of the most common. A major fire, on the 8 February 2004, caused significant damage to housing and infrastructure, resulting in widespread homelessness and loss of personal possessions. Despite this, there was minimal loss of life and few major injuries. The community re-grouped after the fire and Imizamo Yethu has remained viable as a community to the present day. Contemporary geographical research on hazards emphasises aspects of community vulnerability and resilience. The present paper identifies and examines factors that enhance community resilience in the informal settlement of Imizamo Yethu, particularly in response and recovery to fire events. A survey completed in the aftermath of the 2004 fire found that social networks, some formal community institutions that foster community participation and the resourcefulness of individuals were the most important factors underpinning resilience.     

Assessment of risks on a territorial scale for archaeological sites in İzmir

This article focuses on natural, institutional, and human factors threatening archaeological sites. A methodology is developed for assessing risks to multiple assets on a territorial scale. The methodology consists of hazard assessment, vulnerability assessment, and risk assessment. Hazard assessment involves identifying hazard exposure areas and measuring the frequency and intensity of each hazard. Vulnerability assessment incorporates examining physical, managerial, and contextual vulnerabilities of structures and remains. Geographical information systems are utilised for producing hazard, vulnerability, and risk maps. An overall picture of risks for an entire territory allows decision-makers to make informed decisions at an upstream level to limit further degradation and ensure the preservation of archaeological assets. The methodology was tested by conducting a comprehensive study in ?zmir (Turkey), where 229 archaeological sites located in 21 metropolitan districts were studied. The proposed approach provides the promise of applicability across a range of historic environments.     

Managing flood risk in the UK: towards an integration of social and technical perspectives

In recent years, an apparent increase in the frequency and severity of floods in the UK has led to growing concerns about societal exposure and vulnerability to flooding, particularly in the context of climate change, floodplain development and changing insurance practices. Despite the important link between assessments of exposure to flooding (hazard assessments) and issues of societal vulnerability, this link has rarely been explored in detail and has often been reflected in policy terms by a highly technocratic approach to flood risk management. Indeed, more comprehensive studies have usually favoured rigid and deterministic definitions of vulnerability, in keeping with the wider technocratic paradigm pervading management institutions. In an attempt to redress the balance, this paper considers the role of hazard assessment and issues of societal vulnerability as mutually informative debates and advocates a movement away from the technocratic ideals currently favoured in the UK.     

Transboundary river governance and climate vulnerability: Community perspectives in Nepal’s Koshi river basin

Frequent floods in the Koshi River have left the Nepalese vulnerable to erosion and recurring inundation—especially those living on the floodplains. The situation is worsening because water flow in the river is highly uncertain, affected by rainfall in the mountains and by climate change, and influenced by the Koshi barrage, which is governed by the Koshi River Agreement, a bilateral river agreement with India. This study addresses how Koshi River governance contributes to the vulnerability of riverine communities in Nepal by drawing upon ideas about vulnerability and vulnerability mapping. A household survey and interviews were conducted in 2015 for a comparative study of people living on two river islands located upstream and downstream of the barrage. Findings remain relevant because of persistent governance challenges and growing climate change effects, escalating islanders’ vulnerability to recurrent floods. The islanders’ vulnerability was produced locally and also shaped by historical, social, economic, political, geographical, and ecological processes occurring at multiple scales. That insight highlights the need to study the broader political economy of hazard production to understand vulnerability in the context of governance.     

Spatial and temporal variation in vulnerability of crop production to drought in southern Alberta

Growing evidence of global climate change has led to global concerns over the vulnerability of agriculture to drought. Located in a semiarid environment, southern Alberta has suffered significant losses of agricultural productivity due to drought hazards in recent decades. Understanding the relationship between crop production and drought conditions is essential for coping with increasingly uncertain climate conditions. This study attempts to quantify the magnitude of crop production vulnerability to drought in southern Alberta. The standard precipitation index is used to measure drought stress in the region. The empirical results provide a detailed picture of the spatial variation in crop production vulnerability to varying drought conditions. Vulnerability maps from this study reveal that pockets in the study area may experience significant productivity loss given the existing level of adaptive capacity. While the irrigation districts have been associated with a lower level of vulnerability than dryland outside the irrigated region, uncertain water supply under varying climatic conditions coupled with increasing water allocation for non‐agricultural uses may increase the vulnerability in these districts.     

Rethinking the Spatiality of Spatial Planning: Methodological Territorialism and Metageographies

This paper argues for increased attention to the role of territory and territoriality in framing sociospatial discourses in the context of spatial plan making. In particular, it is suggested that the engagement of political actors with processes of spatial planning tends to be framed within particular spatial imaginaries which reflect established political-administrative and territorial boundaries. It is contended that a critical analysis of the territorial framing of processes of spatial planning is necessary in order to understand the capacity for spatial strategies to effectively challenge and reconfigure established sociospatial imaginaries in functional or relational terms. It is suggested that spatially explicit public policy statements, such as planning strategies, may be characterized by specific assumptions of territorial space, in a similar manner to which mainstream social science has contained implicit assumptions of state-centrism. The salience of territorial spatial imaginaries is demonstrated in the case of European spatial planning and through a local case study of city-regional spatial planning and politics in the Greater Dublin Area.     

Assessing Socio‐Economic Vulnerability to Climate Change Impacts and Environmental Hazards in New South Wales and Queensland,Australia

This article systematically reviews and synthesises academic, peer‐reviewed literature to assess the state of knowledge concerning socio‐economic vulnerability to climate change impacts and environmental hazards in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia. It focuses upon empirical research that identifies socio‐economic factors associated with vulnerable subpopulations. Using systematic review methods, 35 articles met the inclusion criteria. These articles are analysed according to their general characteristics, the methods used, and the factors reported to be associated with socio‐economic vulnerability. This body of evidence reveals that (1) the majority of the knowledge about socio‐economic vulnerability in New South Wales and Queensland has only recently emerged; (2) more knowledge has been published about Queensland; and (3) extreme temperature is the most researched environmental hazard. Despite increased research activity over time, the number of factors repeatedly demonstrated to influence socio‐economic vulnerability is small. Age, gender, place of residence, and pre‐existing illness were the most commonly reported factors, although the influence of these factors upon socio‐economic vulnerability is complex. There is scope to extend the empirical research base across a broader range of climate‐related hazards and to better link findings from the domains of climate change vulnerability and population health.     

A spatial analysis of crime in Vancouver, British Columbia: a synthesis of social disorganization and routine activity theory

This article investigates the spatial dimension of automotive theft, break and enter, and violent crime in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1996. The article uses and synthesizes social disorganization theory and routine activity theory as a theoretical backcloth and employs a spatial autoregressive regression procedure that accounts for spatial autocorrelation between crime rates and socio-economic characteristics at the census tract level. Strong support is found for synthesizing these two most common spatial theories of crime. In particular, high unemployment (social disorganization theory) and the presence of young populations (routine activity theory) are the strongest predictors of criminal activity.     

The Role of Bose-Einstein Statistics in Point Pattern Analysis

Bose-Einstein statistics are introduced as the least-biased definition of equal likelihood or randomness available to geographers studying point patterns. The Bose-Einstein distribution is shown to be an entropy-maximizing probability distribution which enables the information theoretic concept of redundancy to be used as a measure of the extent to which an unknown spatial process influences the evolution of the frequency distribution of points. Finally the method is applied to the frequency distribution of karst depressions in limestone regions and the distributions of factories in Greater Manchester.     

Resource Accessibility and Vulnerability in Andhra Pradesh: Caste and Non‐Caste Influences

Coastal Andhra Pradesh in southern India is prone to tropical cyclones. Access to key resources can reduce the vulnerability of the local population to both large‐scale disasters, such as cyclones, and to the sort of small‐scale crises that affect their everyday lives. This article uses primary fieldwork to present a resource accessibility vulnerability index for over 300 respondents. The index indicates that caste is the key factor in determining who has assets, who can access public facilities, who has political connections and who has supportive social networks. The ‘lower’ castes (which tend to be the poorest) are marginalized to the extent that they lack access to assets, public facilities and opportunities to improve their plight. However, the research also indicates that the poor and powerless lower castes are able to utilize informal social networks to bolster their resilience, typically by women's participation with CBOs and NGOs. Nevertheless it is doubtful whether this extra social capital counterbalances the overall results which show that — despite decades of counteractions by government — caste remains a dominant variable affecting the vulnerability of the people of coastal Andhra Pradesh to the hazards that they face.     

Mapping schools' NAPLAN results: a spatial inequality of school outcomes in Australia

This article identifies spatial dimensions of educational outcomes using maps of the 2016 Grade 5 reading results for Australia's National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy for all Australian schools. A geographical information system (GIS) was used to overlay schools' results onto suburbs' advantage or disadvantage to visualise spatial patterns. We then examined the extent to which school results “cluster” in socio‐economically advantaged and disadvantaged suburbs and considered the consistency of spatial patterns for results across major cities. That work illustrates both how GIS can foreground educational inequality and how “the spatial” is more than corollary for student socio‐economic status. Results show substantial differences between urban and remote areas and towns of different size. Maps of cities visualise spatial “clustering” patterns of school results, with most schools in advantaged suburbs having high results and almost no schools in disadvantaged suburbs having high results. Educational outcomes strongly align to local socio‐demographic characteristics, and parallel host communities’ levels of advantage or disadvantage. Differences between public and private schools are less significant than within‐sector differences for schools in advantaged or disadvantaged locales. Patterns in all cities are consistent—schools in advantaged suburbs predominantly have high results, whereas non‐government schools generally perform better than government schools in disadvantaged suburbs. Most concerning is the persistent and increasing trajectory of results in advantaged, and more so in disadvantaged suburbs, of all cities since the first National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy in 2008. Ameliorating spatial inequality between primary schools is one of the greatest challenges for Australians.     

Natural and Unnatural Disasters: Responding with Respect for Indigenous Rights and Knowledges

A key challenge for contemporary democratic societies is how to respond to disasters in ways that foster just and sustainable outcomes that build resilience, respect human rights, and foster economic, social, and cultural well‐being in reasonable timeframes and at reasonable costs. In many places experiencing rapid environmental change, indigenous people continue to exercise some level of self‐governance and autonomy, but they also face the burden of rapid social change and hostile or ambiguous policy settings. Drawing largely on experience in northern Australia, this paper argues that state policies can compound and contribute to vulnerability of indigenous groups to both natural and policy‐driven disasters in many places. State‐sponsored programmes that fail to respect indigenous rights and fail to acknowledge the relevance of indigenous knowledge to both social and environmental recovery entrench patterns of racialised disadvantage and marginalisation and set in train future vulnerabilities and disasters. The paper advocates an approach to risk assessment, preparation, and recovery that prioritises partnerships based on recognition, respect, and explicit commitment to justice. The alternatives are to continue prioritising short‐term expediencies and opportunistic pursuit of integration, or subverting indigenous rights and the knowledge systems that underpin them. This paper argues such alternatives are not only unethical, but also ineffective.     

Variations in the Spatial Pattern of Settlement Locations: An Analysis Based on Proportional Hazards Models

Models based on hazard functions are used to analyze spatial trends in the distance intervals separating point locations. The proportional hazards model, which has been widely applied to analyze intervals of time, is used to investigate variation in the spacing of settlements in Nebraska. This model allows spatial trends in the intervals between settlements to be investigated under very general conditions regarding the interdependence of settlement locations and permits the coordinate locations of the intervals to be treated as spatially varying covariates. An empirical analysis reveals an East-West trend in the spacing of settlements.