Integrating social vulnerability into federal flood risk management planning

While flood risk management planning in the United States has focused on flood control structures designed to protect the economic value of property, it has consistently undervalued other social impacts associated with flooding. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) recently initiated research aimed at understanding how to incorporate social characteristics into the measures currently utilised in flood control project evaluation and consideration. This paper proposes a methodology for incorporating a known measure of social vulnerability, the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI), into USACE civil works planning. Using the USACE South Atlantic Division as the study area, this paper evaluates eight different variations of the social vulnerability metric and their potential deployment in USACE projects. Each formulation is compared with the original‐computed SoVI as a means to test its spatial and statistical sensitivity, including an assessment of each variant's robustness, reducibility, scalability, and transferability. Results indicate that while it is possible to create simplified, yet robust, versions of SoVI for individual places, such ‘lite’ metrics tend to fall short in areas of scalability and transferability in relation to the original SoVI formulation.