Keywords

Land-use change, housing markets, land markets, computational economics, computational social science

Start Date

26-6-2018 2:00 PM

End Date

26-6-2018 3:20 PM

Abstract

The economic costs of coastal hazards have been increasing for decades, and future projections are only exacerbated by continued coastal economic growth and frequency and/or severity of coastal hazards. Policy interventions in the United States to discourage coastal development, preserve or reclaim coastal habitat, and/or decrease regional vulnerability to subsequent hazards have been largely ineffective. The urgent need for more effective adaptation policy has shifted the question from “what is the best policy” to “what is the best combination and sequence of policies” – a shift captured by the increasingly popular concept of adaptive policy pathways. However, accounting for the dynamic values and behaviors of heterogeneous coastal residents that affect, and are in turn affected by, coastal adaptation policies remains a challenge for the design and analysis of adaptive policy pathways. We present an agent-based model (ABM) of a stylized coastal region experiencing uncertain increases in storm frequency and severity, exogenous population growth, and endogenous socio-economic change. The ABM is used to investigate how the socio-economic characteristics and risk perceptions of a coastal population change over time in response to coastal hazards and alternative adaptation policies. The relative costs and benefits, effectiveness, and unintended consequences of a set of plausible adaptive policy pathways that focus on land use in coastal areas are evaluated and compared. While this model implementation is strictly exploratory, we illustrative its usefulness for isolating and identifying key trade-offs and specific pathways among policy options by accounting for the inherently dynamic and heterogeneous behaviors of coastal residents.

Stream and Session

F2: Model-based Support for Designing Adaptive Policy Pathways

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Jun 26th, 2:00 PM Jun 26th, 3:20 PM

Exploring distributional influences on and effects of dynamic adaptive policy pathways for repeated coastal hazards

The economic costs of coastal hazards have been increasing for decades, and future projections are only exacerbated by continued coastal economic growth and frequency and/or severity of coastal hazards. Policy interventions in the United States to discourage coastal development, preserve or reclaim coastal habitat, and/or decrease regional vulnerability to subsequent hazards have been largely ineffective. The urgent need for more effective adaptation policy has shifted the question from “what is the best policy” to “what is the best combination and sequence of policies” – a shift captured by the increasingly popular concept of adaptive policy pathways. However, accounting for the dynamic values and behaviors of heterogeneous coastal residents that affect, and are in turn affected by, coastal adaptation policies remains a challenge for the design and analysis of adaptive policy pathways. We present an agent-based model (ABM) of a stylized coastal region experiencing uncertain increases in storm frequency and severity, exogenous population growth, and endogenous socio-economic change. The ABM is used to investigate how the socio-economic characteristics and risk perceptions of a coastal population change over time in response to coastal hazards and alternative adaptation policies. The relative costs and benefits, effectiveness, and unintended consequences of a set of plausible adaptive policy pathways that focus on land use in coastal areas are evaluated and compared. While this model implementation is strictly exploratory, we illustrative its usefulness for isolating and identifying key trade-offs and specific pathways among policy options by accounting for the inherently dynamic and heterogeneous behaviors of coastal residents.