Efficient Computational Evaluation Tools to Accelerate the Planning of Vulnerability, Resilience, and Sustainability of the Social-Environmental Systems in the City of Nashville

Abstract

Natural hazards have a long historical record of impacting human life and well-being. As a result, more and more efforts have been made to mitigate natural disasters. Nonetheless, the current environmental policy-making process and evaluation framework still need to improve, such as the need for more transparency and public-private communication. For instance, the home buyout program has been created by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to move the identified flood-affected population to other places. However, the transparency in the current environmental policy-making process is with limitations. This dissertation aims to develop a series of efficient computational evaluation tools to accelerate the planning of vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability of the social-environmental systems using the city of Nashville as a case study. First, I developed a social fabric index (SoFI) model to evaluate communities’ vulnerability to natural hazards from a social cohesion and fabric perspective. Next, a Hierarchical Poisson Spatial Disaggregation Regression Model (HPSDRM) was developed as a dasymetric mapping approach to solving the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) challenge. The combination of the SoFI and HPSDRM models enables the policymakers to better evaluate the natural hazards’ mitigation policies’ effects on communities’ social fabric status on a customized spatial scale. Finally, to better address the challenge of increasing the transparency and flexibility in the environmental and sustainability policy inferencing process, a Rmarkdown report and an interactive web-based visualization and sustainability decision support tool using the Rshiny application were built to perform Nashville metro city’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions analysis as a case study. The developed sustainability Rshiny application can make the first step to increasing the transparency and flexibility in the current environmental and sustainability policy-making process between policymakers and the public. Furthermore, the developed sustainability Rshiny application also has great potential to be transplanted to other metro cities like Nashville.