Hurricane sandy a level case study how to#

Scarce scholarly attention, however, is paid to the role of emergent groups when it comes to empowering marginalized and vulnerable communities. Emergent groups have been conceptualized and theorized from various angles, ranging from discussions around their effectiveness, to their possibilities as channels for the positive forces of citizen’s altruism, as well as to more skeptical accounts detailing the challenges emergent groups may pose for established emergency management organizations in relief situations. The scholarship on emergent groups dates to 1950s sociological theory on emergence and convergence, whereas contemporary research forms part of the wider disaster scholarship field. “This case study underscores that human-caused sea-level rise has contributed to damages associated with other past coastal floods and will increasingly aggravate damages in the future as sea levels continue to rise, driven by anthropogenic warming,” said the report, titled Economic Damages From Hurricane Sandy Attributable to Sea Level Rise Caused by Anthropogenic Climate Change published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.Spontaneous, so-called emergent groups often arise in response to emergencies, disasters, and crises where citizens and relief workers find that pre-established norms of behavior, roles, and practices come into flux because of the severity and uncertainty of the situation. And it said the report is a warning of more damage as sea-level rise accelerates in coming decades. It noted other studies have so far found no evidence that Sandy’s intensity, size or unusual track were made more likely by climate change. “But this analysis confines its scope to a controlled, isolated picture of what we can say with high confidence, based on attributable sea-level rise alone,” the researchers said in a statement accompanying the report. In the study released Tuesday, the damage calculations would likely have been higher if researchers had also focused on whether climate change influenced Sandy’s track or increased the strength of its winds, the researchers said. And that new report precedes the release of new rules under the Protecting Against Climate Threats process, in which the Department of Environmental Protection is expected to make it more difficult to build in flood-prone areas, and to place more responsibility on local government to take climate-adaptation measures. The report estimated that more than 60,000 homes statewide are already at risk of chronic flooding, and 2,600 of them were built or rebuilt since superstorm Sandy devastated the Shore in 2012. One foot of sea-level rise will result in daily flooding or permanent inundation for 3,600 homes, rising to more than 11,000 homes if waters rise by 2 feet, that report said. That study estimated that seas at the Jersey Shore will rise 1 to 2 feet from 2000 levels by 2050, and by 2 to 5 feet by the end of the century, based on a scenario of moderate global emissions.

Hurricane sandy a level case study how to#

The document follows a major state report released last month on how to prepare for climate change.

The costs of climate change are likely much greater than we appreciate today.” “Human-caused sea-level rise is already making every coastal flood more destructive and costly. “Just a hands-width of sea-level rise from climate change caused more than 10% of the damage from Sandy’s towering flood waters,” Strauss said. Across the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region, the damage attributable to the human-caused increase in sea level was estimated at $8.1 billion, also 13% of the approximately $62 billion that the storm cost the region.ĭoug O’Malley, director of Environment New Jersey, called the new report “the research we’ve been waiting for” because it’s the first to prove that climate change made Sandy worse than it would otherwise have been. Some 24,500 people and 16,700 homes in New Jersey were exposed to the storm in October 2012 as a result of the extra height of the ocean, the report said.

That anthropogenic warming has been responsible for 4 inches of the sea-level rise in the New York-New Jersey area over the past century, and that increase worsened the storm surge that led to the destruction of thousands of homes and displacement of thousands of people, according to the study by the Princeton-based research group Climate Central, Rutgers University, the Stevens Institute of Technology and others.