The evaluation and management of coastal hazards commonly requires the consideration of a multitude of human and natural factors, in the hopes of quantifying both the susceptibility of a coast to climate change-induced inundation and the social and economic infrastructure at risk of destruction. With these intentions in mind, an index for coastal sensitivity to climate change could be generated from the combination of physical and socio-economical sub-indexes.
The coastal characteristic sub-index was constructed as a combination of McLaughlin and Cooper’s model (2010), and the InVEST Coastal Vulnerability Model – an open-source modelling tool by the Natural Capital Project. A similar ranking system as the one used in McLaughlin and Cooper (2010) will be employed in a form of a multi-criteria analysis to obtain a single sub-index for the coast of Vancouver Island. Given the time constraints of this project, the variables that were used to describe the physical characteristics of the coastline was limited to the elevation, distance from the coast, aspect of slopes relative to storms, and solid geology.
A similar process was employed for the evaluation of socio-economic factors of interest. The social and economic vulnerability of an area can be defined as a function of its population size, land use, and the presence of conservation or roads. The socio-economic sub-index will be constructed using a multi-criteria analysis based off of these variables.
A coastal forcing sub-index was not constructed due to a lack of accessible data – though it would be worthwhile to generate an additional sub-index from tidal and storm data in addition to the two aforementioned sub-indexes.