Predicting population displacements after earthquakes

ABSTRACT

An agent-based object-oriented model for household displacements is presented and used to analyze household decision-making after a hypothetical earthquake in the City of Vancouver, Canada. Temporary displacements and permanent relocation are accounted for. The model for households include considerations of socioeconomic demographics, social networks, and disaster preparedness. The analysis results indicate that nearly 70,000 persons are expected to be displaced by the earthquake. Of those, close to 19,000 will need public sheltering. In addition, nearly 40,000 persons are expected to relocate in the years following the earthquake. Among the displaced persons, occupants of multi-family pre-code and low-code buildings are over-represented. Among those needing public shelter or relocation, there is a disproportionately high number of renters and low-income households. The models in this paper can help the development of pre-disaster plans by suggesting optimal location of public shelters, and by identifying decisions that reduce the number of households relocating.

KEYWORDS:

• Population displacement
• earthquakes
• computer models
• resilience
• disasters

Acknowledgments

The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) (GM 132956/2013-6) and the second author’s Discover Grant from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [GM 132956/2013-6]; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Rodrigo Costa

Rodrigo Costa is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, and a core member of the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative. He received his PhD degree from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2019, after completing a M.Sc. and B.Eng. in Brazil. Dr. Costa’s research is developed on the interface between structural engineering and urban planning. It includes studies on socio-economic impact of natural disasters, modeling disaster losses critical infrastructure systems and interdependencies, and disaster recovery.

Terje Haukaas

Terje Haukaas is a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He implemented the first reliability and sensitivity analysis options in OpenSees and he later spearheaded the development of Rt, a program for multi-hazard and multi-model risk analysis. Professor Haukaas has won several teaching awards, including the university’s highest teaching honor, the 2016-2017 UBC Killam Teaching Prize. He was the early-career keynote speaker at the 11th International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability, ICOSSAR 2013, and he served as the Chair of the 12th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability, ICASP12, held in Vancouver in 2015 and attended by more than 300 delegates from 40 countries.

Stephanie E. Chang

Stephanie E. Chang is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada, with the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) and the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability (IRES). She held a Canada Research Chair in Disaster Management and Urban Sustainability (Tier 2) from 2004 to 2013. Dr. Chang has published extensively on the socio-economic impact of natural disasters, modeling disaster losses, urban risk dynamics, critical infrastructure systems and interdependencies, economic evaluation of disaster mitigations, and disaster recovery. She received the 2001 Shah Family Innovation Prize from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and was EERI’s 2011 Distinguished Lecturer.