Supporting Policymakers with Assessments of Long-Term Risks and Adaptation Strategies for Recovery from Hurricane Michael Using the Island City on a Wedge

In the wake of the 2018 hurricane season, policymakers are faced with an immediate decision problem: How do they balance the need for rapid recovery from damage against the imperative to minimize future risk, while considering the limited resources available? For New York City and coastal Louisiana, state-of-the-art flood risk modeling frameworks provide policy makers with critical insights into the costs and risks associated with mitigating hurricane flood risk. Unfortunately, such models can take years to deploy in regions affected by 2018 hurricanes, and this would be too late to support many critical decisions. To support timely decision making, we developed a coastal risk model of intermediate complexity, the island City On a Wedge (iCOW) (arXiv:1810.08659) that can be quickly adapted to individual communities. We adapt this framework to simulate storm surge risk in Panama City, FL. We show initial results that consider combinations of three potential risk mitigation strategies and evaluate Pareto optimal trade-offs among four objectives. This can provide timely analyses to support policymakers evaluating post-hurricane recovery options.