Abstract
Communities are socio-environmental systems that can be vulnerable to and adversely impacted by natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and storms which have long impacted human life and property. Over the past century, efforts have been made to mitigate natural disasters. Fluvial and riverine flooding from inland waterways is a primary cause flood damages to communities in the United States. Therefore, considering the mitigation efforts employed along inland waterway communities is critical when considering future resilience. Flood vulnerability and risk mapping efforts are focused predominantly on the hydrology and historically have not accounted for consideration of vulnerable populations. For years, policies such as those that facilitate home buyout programs have been applied to mitigate hazards impacts after floods in both inland and coastal areas. Home buyouts offer opportunities to flood-affected homeowners that meet certain criteria to relocate to places that are ideally at lower risk of flooding . The properties that are bought out are often converted to greenspace to further enhance mitigation of flood impacts and improve community resilience (Nelson and Camp 2020). However, home buyout and other such programs can potentially have unintended consequences in the neighborhoods where they take place. When enough residents relocate out of the community to other places, the social fabric (i.e., a network of interpersonal social connections) and the tax base of the flood affected community can be severely damaged. The overall objective of this project is to evaluate the unintended consequences of flood mitigation activities (i.e., buyout programs) represented as community costs of measures such as residential home buyouts. This project aims to develop a model for calculating a Social Fabric Index (SoFI) using publicly available data that is both transferrable and scalable to help communities evaluate potential impacts to the social cohesion of a community when utilizing riverine flood mitigation programs such as buyouts. To test the model’s applicability and robustness, it was applied to a case study area and subjected to uncertainty analysis and global sensitivity analysis. While buyouts are used in both coastal and inland communities as a mitigation approach, this study is focused primarily on a case study of an inland riverine community (i.e., Nashville, Tennessee, US) because an inland community may have more alternatives for mitigation than coastal areas.