516 - Incorporating Household-level Susceptibilities and Capacities in Flood Risk Assessment

Flood risk assessments are evolving to include social vulnerability along with the physical exposure from floods. However, social vulnerability is used to assess impacts from a variety of hazards using the same broad set of socio-demographic characteristics despite social vulnerability being highly context dependent to the specific hazard and location. We divide social vulnerability into the components of susceptibility and capacity to provide further specificity and develop a framework that depicts how these components impact vulnerability over time with the different stages of a flood. We will apply this framework in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia to assess household level flood risk by measuring household susceptibilities normalized by household capacities. Susceptibility includes measures of flood exposure and corresponding impacts to transportation and critical infrastructure. With this approach, cross-scale interactions are represented in the consideration of how disruptions to larger infrastructure systems can impede household level experience and recovery from a flood. Furthermore, capacity includes measures of resources available to households, risk perceptions, and additional psycho-social characteristics, like cognitive biases, that impact behavior in response to flood exposure. This methodological approach will use flood inundation data to assess household level exposure and determine affected critical infrastructure along with data collected from resident surveys and interviews to measure household capacities. This approach can reveal areas of high risk from high susceptibilities and diminished capacities often due to historical marginalization and disinvestment to lead to more equitable flood risk management.