Rural coastal communities are grappling with climate change impacts, including the increased frequency of extreme storm events. Achieving sustainability goals requires addressing environmental, social, and economic dimensions of these events. Social vulnerability indices provide a means of addressing social vulnerability to advance sustainability goals. While such indices offer a metric for assessing relative social vulnerability at a community scale, they often fail to capture more nuanced dimensions of vulnerability. Our exploratory qualitative case study employed two community-driven exercises to examine the impacts due to loss of power, heat, and access to emergency services stemming from a storm event. Participants representing public, conservation, social service, emergency management, and business sectors received a customized social vulnerability index prior to the community exercise, which examined social vulnerabilities associated with an extreme storm event. Participants completed pre- and post-exercise surveys. Transcripts and notes from discussions were analyzed qualitatively. The results provide a refined understanding of who is vulnerable to climate change impacts, the limitations of vulnerability indices in capturing these vulnerabilities, and the potential for community-centered approaches for developing customized vulnerability indices. Such approaches can inform more comprehensive preparation and recovery initiatives in response to increasing extreme storm events.
Johnson et al. (Wed,) studied this question.