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Open access publications by faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students from the Disaster Research Center.
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Browsing Open Access Publications by Subject "equity"
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Item A Framework for Evaluating the Effects of Green Infrastructure in Mitigating Pollutant Transferal and Flood Events in Sunnyside, Houston, TX(Sustainability, 2022) Newman, Galen; Sansom, Garett T.; Yu, Siyu; Kirsch, Katie R.; Li, Dongying; Kim, Youjung; Horney, Jennifer A.; Kim, Gunwoo; Musharrat, SaimaThere is a growing and critical need to develop solutions for communities that are at particular risk of the impacts of the nexus of hazardous substances and natural disasters. In urban areas at high risk for flooding and lacking proper land-use controls, communities are vulnerable to environmental contamination from industrial land uses during flood events. This research uniquely applied a series of landscape pzerformance models to evaluate such associations including (1) the Green Values National Stormwater Calculator, (2) the Value of Green Infrastructure Tool, and (3) the Long-Term Hydrologic Impact Assessment Model. This paper presents a framework for combining landscape performance models, which are often only individually applied, to evaluate green infrastructure impacts on flood mitigation and pollutant transfer during flooding events using the Sunnyside neighborhood in Houston, Texas, USA, as a case site. The results showed that the plan reduced the risk of flooding, decreased stormwater runoff contaminants, and provided a possible direction to protect vulnerable communities.Item Promoting Spatial Coordination in Flood Buyouts in the United States: Four Strategies and Four Challenges from the Economics of Land Preservation Literature(Natural Hazards Review, 2023-02-01) Dineva, Polina K.; McGranaghan, Christina; Messer, Kent D.; Palm-Forster, Leah H.; Paul, Laura A.; Siders, A. R.Managed retreat in the form of voluntary flood-buyout programs provides homeowners with an alternative to repairing and rebuilding residences that have sustained severe flood damage. Buyout programs are most economically efficient when groups of neighboring properties are acquired because they can then create unfragmented flood control areas and reduce the cost of providing local services. However, buyout programs in the United States often fail to acquire such efficient, unfragmented spaces, for various reasons, including long administrative timelines, the way in which buyout offers are made, desires for community cohesion, and attachments to place. Buyout programs have relied primarily on posted price mechanisms involving offers that are accepted or rejected by homeowners with little or no negotiation. In this paper, we describe four alternative strategies that have been used successfully in land-preservation agricultural–environmental contexts to increase acceptance rates and decrease fragmentation: agglomeration bonuses, reverse auctions, target constraints, and hybrid approaches. We discuss challenges that may arise during their implementation in the buyout context—transaction costs, equity and distributional impacts, unintended consequences, and social pressure—and recommend further research into the efficiency and equity of applying these strategies to residential buyout programs with the explicit goal of promoting spatial coordination.