Author Description

Understanding and planning for climate change is a complex systems problem that is interdisciplinary and requires place-based and impact-specific management practices for communities to become resilient to a changing environment. A growing challenge for risk, vulnerability, and resilience assessment is the ability to understand, characterize, and model the complexities of joint socio-ecological systems, often delineated with differing natural (e.g., watershed) and imposed (e.g., political) boundaries at the landscape scale. Risk assessment, in its most basic form, is a simplification of a complex problem in order to understand the basic cause and effect relationships within a system. Alternatively, an integrated risk and resilience assessment moves toward a solution-based assessment with the incorporation of adaptive management practices as one of four parts of cyclical system resilience (i.e., prepare, absorb, recover, and adapt). The greater Charleston Harbor Watershed region of South Carolina is highly susceptible to the current and projected impacts of climate change due to low lying geography, a strongly bimodal socioeconomic spectrum, and invaluable coastal ecosystem services. Using the Charleston Harbor Watershed region as a case study, this dissertation: 1) illustrates the incorporation of place-based social vulnerability into environmental risk assessment, 2) introduces a parameterization framework for the systematic deconstruction of management objectives and goals into assessment metrics and quantifiable measurement metrics, and 3) demonstrates the integration of risk and resilience quantification to produce scenario-based adaptive management options.