Project Summary: Climate change is a major risk to urban landscapes and the communities, fauna, and flora within. While the climate crisis impacts the natural, cultural, and built environment globally, regional impacts may differ significantly based on geographic, ecological, socio-economic, or cultural factors. Therefore, both micro-and macro-level approaches to climate change mitigation are necessary to tackle the causes and symptoms of this global environmental problem. Such approaches also depend on the type of human settlement and its environment. In particular, coastal cities are urban typologies where sea-level rise, flooding, storm events, salt-water intrusion, and erosion make climate change visible to individual residents and entire communities. Similar place-related yet generic threats apply to many cities along low-lying coastlines around the world. Yet, additional anthropogenic vulnerability drivers, such as industrial development and environmental injustice, may accelerate or intensify community-level impacts and localize particular issues. The scale of a city provides a tangible framework to investigate how environmental and human-caused impacts have been and will be shaping the built environment. Grounding climate change mitigation locally provides the opportunity for community and stakeholder involvement as perceivable and place-related issues can form the premise for an adequate and collectively accepted adaptation response.

This project utilizes Texas’ Coastal Bend Region as a case-study to identify climate change vulnerability drivers linking this topic to specific places and highlighting the spatial relationship between the respective hazards and the location of human settlements. The Coastal Bend is home to well over half a million residents in its sparsely populated nine counties. Particular focus will be on Nueces, San Patricio, and Aransas County as they currently see the most significant industrial growth in the region and have a higher percentage of people living in poverty than the Texas state average. In addition to climate change impacts, this region has been experiencing a significant industrial growth rate since 2015, when the US oil export embargo expired. Communities now find themselves in the middle of a rapidly growing petrochemical industry, occupying the land and water in the immediate proximity to residential zones. Numerous organizations have started to work on selected sites to identify major hazards, yet a comprehensive summary looking at the regional scale is missing. Therefore, the development of the proposed Coastal Vulnerability Atlas would be both a helpful guide for vulnerable coastal communities identifying risks and an academic research initiative addressing a crucial research gap.

Full Title: Coastal vulnerability atlas: Identifying climate change drivers, hazards, and impacts in Texas’ Coastal Bend Region

Sponsor: University of Texas at Arlington Research Enhancement Program

Award Period: June 2022-Dec2023

Funding: $16,000

Team: Oswald Jenewein, Michelle Hummel, Karabi Bezboruah