Social Indicators to Inform Community Evacuation Modeling and Planning: Fid-Bau Portal

Social Indicators to Inform Community Evacuation Modeling and Planning

Seites-Rundlett, William / Garcia-Bande, Elena / Álvarez-Mingo, Alejandra / Torres-Machi, Cristina / Corotis, Ross B.

Recent research has emphasized the importance of social vulnerability in assessing overall community vulnerability. This is supported by the observation that socially marginalized groups tend to experience the worst disaster outcomes because they lack the advantages that benefit more dominant groups within stratified social systems. The importance of social marginalization is also reflected in recent discussions of resilience. Indicators of social stratification are used to measure social vulnerability and resilience in the context of disasters. These are often aggregated into composite indexes, which are useful in providing a quantitative metric that can be used to identify community priorities and inform decision-making. However, a major shortcoming in the use of the indexes has been the lack of validation with observable disaster outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a link between evacuation behavior and these indexes through a review and analysis of prominent indexes measuring social vulnerability and resilience. The analysis presents a comparison of prominent indexes of community resilience, social vulnerability, and social capital with recognized factors that influence evacuation behavior and the different steps of evacuation modeling. The analysis revealed that no single index provided a comprehensive match for the factors relevant to evacuation behavior, although SoVI was found to provide the most overlap. This review has identified the potential to incorporate more social, behavioral, and human-centric indicators into evacuation modeling to improve the prediction of trip generation, trip distribution, and trip assignment.