Temporal and spatial changes in social vulnerability to natural hazards

By S. Cutter, Christina Finch. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008

1,337 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During the past four decades (1960–2000), the United States experienced major transformations in population size, development patterns, economic conditions, and social characteristics. These social, economic, and built-environment changes altered the American hazardscape in profound ways, with more people living in high-hazard areas than ever before. To improve emergency management, it is important to recognize the variability in the vulnerable populations exposed to hazards and to develop place-based emergency plans accordingly. The concept of social vulnerability identifies sensitive populations that may be less likely to respond to, cope with, and recover from a natural disaster. Social vulnerability is complex and dynamic, changing over space and through time. This paper presents empirical evidence on the spatial and temporal patterns in social vulnerability in the United States from 1960 to the present. Using counties as our study unit, we found that those components that consistently increased social vulnerability for all time periods were density (urban), race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The spatial patterning of social vulnerability, although initially concentrated in certain geographic regions, has become more dispersed over time. The national trend shows a steady reduction in social vulnerability, but there is considerable regional variability, with many counties increasing in social vulnerability during the past five decades.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/683c9ee1f01afbfc7289c995ab2dc3b40be01241

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Social vulnerability to floods: Review of case studies and implications for measurement (2015, background): “questions of scale [15,44,86], temporal change [32], specific ha-”
Climate Change and the Global Financial Crisis: A Case of Double Exposure (2010, background): “Cutter and Finch (2008) highlighted the Central Valley as one of the U.”
Network resilience (2020, background): “Vulnerability is usually defined through the degree of exposure to hazards and the degree of losses due to the risks [708, 709, 710, 711].”
Framing vulnerability, risk and societal responses: the MOVE framework (2013, background): “…and suffer damage and loss when impacted by single or compound hazard events (UNDRO 1980; Timmerman 1981; Maskrey 1984; Cardona 1986, 1990; Liverman 1990; Cannon 1994, 2006; Blaikie et al. 1996; UNISDR 2004, 2009; Birkmann 2006a, b, c; Cutter et al. 2003; Cutter and Finch 2008; Cutter et al. 2008).”
The power of people: social capital’s role in recovery from the 1995 Kobe earthquake (2011, positive): “U N C O R R E C T E D P R O O F 32 Scholars recognize that the negative effects of disasters are concentrated in the most 33 socially vulnerable populations, which include the poor, minority groups, women, and the 34 elderly (Cutter and Emrich 2006; Cutter and Finch 2008).”
The psychological impacts of global climate change. (2011, background): “However, media can also moderate the response to a disaster, for example, by encouraging people to seek counseling and providing information about how to do so.”