Research

Interests 

    • Coastal hazards, adaptation, and resilience
    • Displacement and relocation
    • Climate and environmental security 
    • Development of decision support tools   

    

My research focuses on coastal adaptation, resilience, and vulnerability. More specifically, I am interested in whether relocation can serve and under what circumstances as a effective adaptation strategy and viable solution to sea-level rise in coastal communities, as well as what opportunities could emerge from this process. My research interests also include:

• Adaptation of coastal land use and development patterns to flooding;
• Climate change impacts on coastal migration dynamic and displacement;
• Development of policy and planning mechanisms to improve relocation planning;
• Utilization of conceptual models, decision support tools, and mapping to inform relocation process; and
• Potential of different adaptation strategies to foster resilience, promote sustainability, and support national security.

A successful adaptation to accelerated coastal flooding can be achieved only by a holistic and comprehensive integration of knowledge and experiences from many different disciplines and stakeholder groups. Accordingly, my research efforts  place an emphasis on the co-production of  knowledge, transformative learning, and local and regional capacity building.

Publications  

  • Bukvic, A., Borate, A., Hughes, S. Imburgia, S. Stiles, S., & Weaver R. (2019). Why context and scale matter: Exploring neighborhood level resilience in the City of Hampton, Virginia. Journal of Flood Risk Management (in print).
  • Bukvic, A. & Borate, A. (2020). Acquisition and relocation in coastal communities: assessment of FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program 1989-2016. Environmental Hazards. DOI: 10.1080/17477891.2020.1804819.
  • Prince, B.C., Juran, L., Venkataramana, S., Bukvic, A., & MacDonald, M.C. (2020). A statistical and spatial analysis of water poverty using a modified Water Poverty Index. International Journal of Water Resources Development, DOI: 10.1080/07900627.2020.1768829
  • Bukvic, A., Rohat, G., Apotsos, A., & de Sherbinin, A. (2020). Coastal vulnerability mapping: what is meta-analysis telling us about this practice? Sustainability, Special Issue: Climate Risk and Vulnerability Mapping, 12(7), DOI: 10.3390/su12072822
  • Bukvic, A., Biber, P., Barreto, M., & Roberts, S. (2020). Mobility: Strategy for a New Coastline. Coastal Management, 47(6), pp. 611-620. DOI:10.1080/08920753.2019.1669103
  • Bukvic, A. (2019). Facilitating stakeholders’ engagement in climate change relocation planning: The Coastal Relocation Leaf. Social Sciences, 8(6): 197. DOI:10.3390/socsci8060197
  • de Sherbinin, A., Bukvic, A., Rohat, G., Gall, M., McCusker, B., Preston, B., Apotsos, A., Fish, C., Kienberger, S., Muhonda, P., Wilhelmi, O., Macharia, D., Shubert, W., Sliuzas, R., Tomaszewski, B., & Zhang, S. (2019). Climate Change Vulnerability Mapping: A Systematic Review and Future Prospects. WIRES Climate Change 10(5), e600. DOI:10.1002/wcc.600
  • Bukvic, A. & Harrald, J. (2019). Rural versus urban perspective on coastal flooding: the insights from the U.S. Mid-Atlantic communities. Climate Risk Management 23, 7-18. DOI:10.1016/j.crm.2018.10.004
  • Bukvic, A., Gohlke J., Borate, A., Suggs, J. (2018). The health and wellbeing risk to older residents residing in flood-prone coastal communities. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Special Issue: Extreme Weather Events and Health, 15(12), 2900, DOI: 10.3390/ijerph15122900
  • Bukvic, A., Zhu, H. Lavoie, R., & Becker, A. (2018) The role of proximity to waterfront in the relocation decision-making post-Hurricane Sandy. Ocean and Coastal Management 154, pp. 8-18, DOI: 10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2018.01.002
  • Bukvic, A. (2017) Towards the Sustainable Climate Change Population Movement: the Relocation Suitability Index. Climate and Development, DOI: 10.1080/17565529.2017.1291407
  • Bukvic, A., Owen, G. (2016) Attitudes towards relocation following Hurricane Sandy: should we stay or should we go? Disasters 41:1. DOI: 10.1111/disa.12186
  • Bukvic, A. (2015) Identifying Gaps and Inconsistencies in the Use of Relocation Rhetoric: A Prerequisite for Sound Relocation Policy and Planning. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 20(7), pp. 1203-1209, DOI: 10.1007/s11027-013-9532-5
  • Bukvic, A., Smith, A., Zhang, A. (2015) Evaluating Drivers of Coastal Relocation in Hurricane Sandy Affected Communities. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 215-228, DOI: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2015.06.008
  • Bukvic, A. (2015) Integrated Framework for the Relocation Potential Assessment of Coastal Communities (RPACC): Application to Hurricane-Sandy Affected Areas. Environment, Systems, and Decisions 35(2): pp. 264-278, DOI 10.1007/s10669-015-9546-5

Grants  

2019 National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Early Career Innovators Fellowship; Proposal title: Changing coastlines, changing mobility: when staying in place is no longer an option; Theme: Coastal Regions and Human Settlements, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, May 2019 – 2021

NSF Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE), proposal #1920478; Team: Bukvic, A. (PI), Irish, J., Shortridge, J. & Zobel C. (all Virginia Tech); Title: Assessing the impacts of coastal flood-induced relocation on local jurisdictions, 2019-2021

This interdisciplinary project studies the impacts of relocation in coastal communities on local jurisdictions. It will provide data about possible consequences of flood-driven depopulation of coastal jurisdictions, including the loss of sociocultural identity and economic viability. This information is imperative to support localities in policy changes that would minimize the adverse effects of flood-induced relocation on their governance and institutional performance. This project serves national interests by advancing science on emerging problems in coastal communities whose resilience is vital for national security, stability, and welfare. Its societal benefits are also achieved by including highly vulnerable coastal communities (e.g. rural fishing villages and urban poor), which are already experiencing various socioeconomic and environmental challenges that may compound their vulnerability. Results and supplemental materials will be disseminated via an online web portal designed to facilitate a community of researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders interested in coastal resilience. Outreach will be enhanced by the Virginia Cooperative Extension, which has a long history of education in rural communities.

The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to improve the scientific understanding of possible consequences of coastal flood-induced relocation on local jurisdictions with diverse socio-economic, cultural, institutional, and historic contexts. It will establish scenarios of coastal flood-driven relocation over different time scales in both rural and urban settings to discern potential implications of this process on the socioeconomic viability of local jurisdictions. This mixed-methods approach will rely on both quantitative and qualitative data to capture the contextual influences and complexities that typically shape local decision-making. The project activities will: 1) examine the risk of coastal flooding and develop spatiotemporal flood exposure scenarios of potential loss of businesses, real-estate, and corresponding population; 2) determine preferences for relocation destination among residents living in flood-prone areas obtained via household surveys, and 3) discern emergent macro-scale trends in relocation behavior using Agent Based Modeling (ABM). The analysis will be applied to two contrasting case study locations with different levels of urbanization on the Eastern Shore, Maryland, and in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Important aspects of the research strategy include interdisciplinary integration of geography, coastal and system engineering, and business analytics, as well as holistic analysis of circumstances that may affect the extent and progression of relocation from coastal flood-affected periphery. This project will ultimately lead to improved understanding of how physical, behavioral, and institutional factors interact to shape the evolution of coastal communities under increasing flood risks, thereby leading to more resilient communities in the coastal zone.

NSF CRISP Type 1/Collaborative Research, proposal #1638283; Team: Rhode-Barbarigos L. (PI), Zuo, W., Chao, S. (University of Miami) & Saad, W., Bukvic, A. (Virginia Tech); Title: Human-Centered Computational Framework for Urban and Community Design of Resilient Coastal Cities, 2017-2019

Coastal cities play a critical role in the global economy yet they are increasingly being exposed to natural hazards and disasters, such as hurricanes, recurrent flooding, and sea-level rise. These events can directly impact critical coastal infrastructure such as the energy, transportation, water, and sewer systems as well as the built environment, thus adversely affecting the safety and well-being of urban residents. The goal of this research is to create novel paradigms for resilient urban and community design uniquely tailored toward coastal cities. As such, it will enhance the damage-tolerance of the critical coastal infrastructure and foster a socio-economic resilience via anticipatory interventions. The developed techniques and simulation models will contribute to redefining traditional urban design strategies with the integration of architecture, urban design, land-use planning, civil engineering, and advanced computational methods centered on socio-economic drivers. This project will be conducted in close collaboration with the Cities of Miami and Miami Beach, which will serve as case study locations for the proposed research. Therefore, the proposed framework will have a direct and tangible societal impact on the high-risk coastal urban centers and provide them with the context-specific recommendations on optimal adaptation options. Broad dissemination efforts will be undertaken via a series of seminars targeted towards decision-makers and practitioners within the Cities of Miami and Miami Beach. An exposition at the Miami Museum of Science will also be organized to raise awareness and promote research on resiliency. The project will involve students via direct engagement in the research as well as via new learning modules that will integrate research finding in the existing curriculum. The proposed educational plan will thus help train a new workforce that is skilled in STEM disciplines, in general, and adept in resiliency planning of coastal cities, in particular.

This transformative research will introduce a novel methodological approach that symbiotically integrates urban design and socio-economic considerations into an advanced simulation and optimization framework to enhance the resilience of a coastal city’s critical infrastructure. This human-centered computational framework will help identify key resilient infrastructures, design forms, and land use patterns that will increase the damage tolerance of coastal cities while reducing the socio-economic impacts of coastal hazards and disasters. The proposed approach will bring together an interdisciplinary set of skills from engineering, architecture, and social sciences, to yield several key innovations: 1) a holistic human-centered computational framework for the design of resilient cities; 2) identification of key typologies, morphologies and their interdependencies by analyzing the urban design and its infrastructure networks; 3) an innovative flexible modeling and computational framework that integrate socio-economic characteristics for simulation and resilience optimization (damage tolerance) of the critical infrastructure; 4) a novel optimization framework that will facilitate making damage tolerance decisions that can achieve anticipatory resilience in face of disaster uncertainty; and 5) new identified interdependences, trends, and typologies of socio-economic system of highly-urbanized coastal communities based on the Cities of Miami and Miami Beach in Florida. In summary, the proposed research will lay the scientific foundation for envisioning and redesigning resilient coastal cities making them ready to meet anticipated future challenges.