Hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, and climate resilience

My research addresses the rising cost of extreme climate and weather events in the United States and alternative approaches to promote resilience.

nature-based solutions: conservation in the floodplain

With colleagues, I have evaluated the costs and benefits of conservation of natural lands such as forests and wetlands in the floodplain as a way to provide flood attenuation ecosystem services. I have an article in Environmental Science and Technology, coauthored with Carolyn Kousky, Sheila Olmstead, and Molly Macauley, that looks at strategically placing “natural infrastructure” in a riverine floodplain in Wisconsin. Carolyn Kousky and I took these methods to the Meramec River in Missouri; we performed a retrospective analysis of the benefits and costs of the Meramec Greenway. That paper is published in Ecological Economics (ungated version available here).

I have been working with engineers at George Mason University to evaluate the storm surge attenuation benefits of coastal wetlands in the Chesapeake Bay region. These methods combine hydrodynamic surge modeling, land cover information, and detailed property value data to calculate the damages avoided from changes in wetlands land area. A paper published in Natural Hazards Review shows how hurricane damages are likely to change as wetlands are lost due to sea level rise. One key finding: a weak storm in the future will have the same damaging impacts as a strong storm has today, just because of sea level rise and land use change.

coastal development and storm risks

In “Modeling Coastal Land and Housing Markets: Understanding the Competing Influences of Amenities and Storm Risks,” Nicholas Magliocca, Virginia McConnell, and I use an economic agent-based model to analyze how housing consumers trade off coastal amenity values and storm risks (ungated version here). As storm frequency increases with climate change, our model shows people moving away from the coast, land values falling, and lower income people moving in—patterns that often play out in the real world. In a follow-on paper, Nick and I incorporate alternative forms of risk perception, and repeated storm events, in the model to see how behavioral failures can influence coastal residents and affect land use patterns.

I have work in progress on disaster migration. With Danae Hernandez Cortes, a PhD student at UC-Santa Barbara, I am analyzing how hurricanes affect county-to-county migration patterns in the U.S. Presentation scheduled for CNREP 2019 conference in New Orleans in May 2019. Stay tuned for a draft working paper.

I have done a lot of research on transfer of development rights (TDR) programs. TDRs allow landowners to sell their development rights for use on another property. The “sending” property usually gets a conservation easement placed on it; the “receiving” property is developed more densely than would otherwise be allowed under the baseline zoning rules. In this blog post, I wrote about the potential to use TDRs to protect land at risk from sea level rise. I have several other papers on TDRs; Virginia McConnell and I published a review in Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, which summarizes some of the pros and cons.

flood risk perceptions, insurance, disaster aid

Andrew Royal and I conducted a survey to formally test for overoptimism in the floodplain and how it affects flood insurance purchases. Our paper, “Flood Risk Perceptions and Insurance Choice: Do Decisions in the Floodplain Reflect Overoptimism?” was published in Risk Analysis in 2018. This blog post provides a quick, user-friendly summary. tl;dr… yes, people seem to be overly optimistic: the average person thinks her flood risks are less than those of her neighbors.

The cost of providing aid after a disaster has risen dramatically in the U.S. But the amount of money most people get is pretty small. Danae Hernandez Cortes and I analyzed the FEMA data on disaster aid for the 2017 hurricane season (that was a big one: Harvey, Irma and Maria). In this blog post, we highlight three main findings: (1) disaster aid amounts are small ($8,900, on average, for homeowners affected by Hurricane Harvey, the highest amount of the three hurricanes); (2) most people getting disaster aid did not have flood insurance (28% for Harvey, again the highest of the three); and (3) richer households get more aid, on average, than poorer ones. The inequities in addressing disasters are becoming increasingly well-recognized. This webinar I co-organized with Carlos Martin includes a great panel discussion of the environmental justice issues with regard to flooding, disasters, and climate adaptation.

coastal protected lands

Natural lands in coastal areas provide protective services but the lands themselves are under threat from sea level rise and increasingly intense storms. Many of these natural lands are valuable parks, wildlife refuges, and other protected areas. In “Threatened Protection: Sea Level Rise and Coastal Protected Lands of the Eastern United States,” Becky Epanchin-Niell, Carolyn Kousky, Alexandra Thompson and I mapped the lands under threat in the eastern U.S. by state and considered their value based on land cover characteristics. We also looked at which states are addressing the challenge (way to go, Maryland) and which are ignoring it (ahem, South Carolina). Here’s a shorter version of the paper, published in RFF’s Resources magazine.

wildfires

Wildfires in the United States are increasing in frequency and intensity. 2020 and 2021 were two of the worst fire years on record. My research is analyzing impacts on outdoor recreation, paying particular attention to the role of wildfire smoke and whether recreationists are deterred by it. With colleagues Matt Wibbenmeyer and Jacob Gellman, I published a paper in the journal Forest Policy and Economics in January 2022 that measured the number of recreationists affected by fire and smoke, using daily data over a ten-year period, and the extent to which recreationists altered their plans for fire and smoke. We found that smoke causes few cancellations, which means recreationists may be exposed to poor air quality while outdoors. With my colleague Matt Wibbenmeyer, I am also analyzing the local economic impacts of wildfires, i.e., impacts on job and earnings growth rates and business survivability. We will present preliminary results from this work at the 2022 American Economic Association meetings on January 9, 2022.