Research

Interests 

    • Coastal hazards, adaptation, and resilience
    • Displacement and relocation
    • Risk communication
    • Development of decision support tools
    • Environmental planning and policy     

    

My research focuses on coastal adaptation and resilience. More specifically, I am interested in whether relocation can serve and under what circumstances as a workable 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 ensure regional and 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. & Harrald, J. (2018). Rural versus urban perspective on coastal flooding: the insights from the U.S. Mid-Atlantic communities. Climate Risk Management (DOI:10.1016/j.crm.2018.10.004, in press)
  • 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  

NSF CRISP Type 1/Collaborative Research; 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.