40
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Risky Development: Increasing Exposure to Natural Hazards in the United States

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Losses from natural hazards are escalating dramatically, with more properties and critical infrastructure affected each year. Although the magnitude, intensity, and/or frequency of certain hazards has increased, development contributes to this unsustainable trend, as disasters emerge when natural disturbances meet vulnerable assets and populations. To diagnose development patterns leading to increased exposure in the conterminous United States (CONUS), we identified earthquake, flood, hurricane, tornado, and wildfire hazard hotspots, and overlaid them with land use information from the Historical Settlement Data Compilation data set. Our results show that 57% of structures (homes, schools, hospitals, office buildings, etc.) are located in hazard hotspots, which represent only a third of CONUS area, and ∼1.5 million buildings lie in hotspots for two or more hazards. These critical levels of exposure are the legacy of decades of sustained growth and point to our inability, lack of knowledge, or unwillingness to limit development in hazardous zones. Development in these areas is still growing more rapidly than the baseline rates for the nation, portending larger future losses even if the effects of climate change are not considered.

          Key Points

          • More than half of the structures in the conterminous United States are exposed to potentially devastating natural hazards

          • Growth rates in hazard hotspots exceed the national trend

          • Risk assessments can be improved by considering multiple hazards, mitigation history and fine‐scale data on the built environment

          Related collections

          Most cited references102

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Global change and the ecology of cities.

          Urban areas are hot spots that drive environmental change at multiple scales. Material demands of production and human consumption alter land use and cover, biodiversity, and hydrosystems locally to regionally, and urban waste discharge affects local to global biogeochemical cycles and climate. For urbanites, however, global environmental changes are swamped by dramatic changes in the local environment. Urban ecology integrates natural and social sciences to study these radically altered local environments and their regional and global effects. Cities themselves present both the problems and solutions to sustainability challenges of an increasingly urbanized world.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards*

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                virginia.iglesias@colorado.edu
                a.braswell@ufl.edu
                Journal
                Earths Future
                Earths Future
                10.1002/(ISSN)2328-4277
                EFT2
                Earth's Future
                John Wiley and Sons Inc. (Hoboken )
                2328-4277
                12 July 2021
                July 2021
                : 9
                : 7 ( doiID: 10.1002/eft2.v9.7 )
                : e2020EF001795
                Affiliations
                [ 1 ] Earth Lab Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) University of Colorado Boulder CO USA
                [ 2 ] Department of Geography University of Colorado Boulder CO USA
                [ 3 ] Human‐Environment Systems Boise State University Boise ID USA
                Author notes
                [*] [* ] Correspondence to:

                V. Iglesias and A. E. Braswell,

                virginia.iglesias@ 123456colorado.edu ;

                a.braswell@ 123456ufl.edu

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5732-3714
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3677-0635
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1846-5191
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7745-9990
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7168-3289
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3983-7970
                Article
                EFT2844 2020EF001795
                10.1029/2020EF001795
                8365714
                34435071
                3193485c-8360-4632-b828-ad3c8063d9ac
                © 2021. The Authors. Earth's Future published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union.

                This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

                History
                : 27 May 2021
                : 02 September 2020
                : 02 June 2021
                Page count
                Figures: 8, Tables: 0, Pages: 0, Words: 11761
                Funding
                Funded by: University of Colorado Boulder
                Funded by: University of Colorado Population Center
                Award ID: CUPC, Project 2P2CHD066613‐06
                Funded by: Eunice Kennedy Shriver Institute of Child Health Human and Human Development
                Funded by: National Science Foundation (NSF) , doi 10.13039/100000001;
                Award ID: 1924670
                Funded by: National Institutes of Health
                Award ID: P2CHD066613
                Categories
                Atmospheric Composition and Structure
                Air/Sea Constituent Fluxes
                Volcanic Effects
                Biogeosciences
                Climate Dynamics
                Modeling
                Computational Geophysics
                Modeling
                Numerical Solutions
                Cryosphere
                Avalanches
                Mass Balance
                Modeling
                Geodesy and Gravity
                Mass Balance
                Ocean Monitoring with Geodetic Techniques
                Ocean/Earth/atmosphere/hydrosphere/cryosphere interactions
                Global Change from Geodesy
                Space Geodetic Surveys
                Global Change
                Abrupt/Rapid Climate Change
                Climate Variability
                Climate Dynamics
                Earth System Modeling
                Impacts of Global Change
                Land/Atmosphere Interactions
                Oceans
                Regional Climate Change
                Remote Sensing
                Sea Level Change
                Solid Earth
                Water Cycles
                Hydrology
                Climate Impacts
                Hydrological Cycles and Budgets
                Land/Atmosphere Interactions
                Modeling
                Remote Sensing
                Informatics
                Modeling
                Marine Geology and Geophysics
                Gravity and Isostasy
                Mathematical Geophysics
                Atmospheric Processes
                Climate Change and Variability
                Climatology
                General Circulation
                Land/Atmosphere Interactions
                Ocean/Atmosphere Interactions
                Regional Modeling
                Remote Sensing
                Theoretical Modeling
                Oceanography: General
                Climate and Interannual Variability
                Numerical Modeling
                Natural Hazards
                Multihazards
                Methods
                Exposure
                Risk
                Remote Sensing and Disasters
                Natural Hazards
                Atmospheric
                Geological
                Oceanic
                Physical Modeling
                Climate Impact
                Disaster Risk Analysis and Assessment
                Nonlinear Geophysics
                Oceanography: Physical
                Air/Sea Interactions
                Decadal Ocean Variability
                General Circulation
                Ocean influence of Earth rotation
                Sea Level: Variations and Mean
                Surface Waves and Tides
                Tsunamis and Storm Surges
                Paleoceanography
                Abrupt/Rapid Climate Change
                Policy Sciences
                Benefit‐cost Analysis
                Radio Science
                Radio Oceanography
                Seismology
                Earthquake Ground Motions and Engineering Seismology
                Volcano Seismology
                Volcanology
                Volcano/Climate Interactions
                Atmospheric Effects
                Volcano Monitoring
                Effusive Volcanism
                Mud Volcanism
                Explosive Volcanism
                Remote Sensing of Volcanoes
                Volcanic Hazards and Risks
                Research Article
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                2.0
                July 2021
                Converter:WILEY_ML3GV2_TO_JATSPMC version:6.0.5 mode:remove_FC converted:16.08.2021

                natural hazards,exposure,risk,zillow,vulnerability
                natural hazards, exposure, risk, zillow, vulnerability

                Comments

                Comment on this article