New Orleans is an archetype for coastal ecosystems under immediate threat by natural hazards. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina resulted in more than 1500 deaths and huge damage to the built-up and natural environment. There were 76.8% of the population suffered from flooding. In the post-Katrina era, the city’s social-ecological system has undergone restoration and reorganization. To better understand a system’s capacity to withstand and adapt to natural hazards, we assessed and compared the social and ecological conditions before and after Hurricane Katrina through an integrated approach.
We evaluated ecosystem services by quantifying vegetation and wetland changes over time in ArcGIS. The land-cover data were obtained from NOAA’s Coastal Change Analysis Program. As for the social aspect, inequality among income and ethnic/racial groups has been an issue in New Orleans. Thus, we used spatial autocorrelation (Moran’s I) to quantify the pattern of change and test whether the spatial distribution of some social and economic variables, became less clustered (exhibited more heterogeneity spatially) than pre-Katrina condition. Social and economic data were collected from U.S. Census at the Census-tract scale.
Results/Conclusions
Between 1990 and 2000, only 5 neighborhoods had increasing wealth. However, 20 neighborhoods had increasing wealth between 2000 and 2014 (after Katrina). The spatial analysis reveals that while occupied housing (renter and owner) and vacancy rate dispersed (Moran’s I declined), income became more clustered over time (Moran’s I increased). Accordingly, the aggregation pattern suggests that income inequality enlarged spatially over time. Although the ongoing population recovery and increase of average income may be signs of revitalization, the city and metropolitan area continue to face socioeconomic inequalities and vulnerability to natural disasters. As the degree of urbanization increases, our findings suggest that high poverty rates in some areas, and environmental concerns including loss of wetlands and unmanaged vegetation on abandoned lands, erode resilience of the city to natural hazards.