Abstract
Despite decades of regulatory efforts in the United States to decrease vulnerability in developed coastal zones, exposure of residential assets to hurricane damage is increasing — even in places where hurricanes have struck before. Comparing plan-view footprints of individual residential buildings before and long after major hurricane strikes, we find a systematic pattern of ‘building back bigger’ among renovated and new properties.
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Data availability
Study data are available through Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7108763). Coordinates for the start and end points of the sampled areas are shown in Supplementary Table 4.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (to E.D.L. and R.D.), and by the UK NERC BLUEcoast project (to E.D.L.; NE/N015665/2). We thank R. C. Ballinger and P. Barnard.
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The authors declare no competing interests.
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PWL conceived the idea; all authors contributed to data collection; E.D.L., P.W.L., E.B.G., and R.D. conducted the analysis; E.D.L., E.B.G., and P.W.L. wrote the manuscript, with contributions from R.D. and S.B.A.
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Supplementary Information
Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Reference 1, Supplementary Figure 1, Supplementary Tables 1–4
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Lazarus, E.D., Limber, P.W., Goldstein, E.B. et al. Building back bigger in hurricane strike zones. Nat Sustain 1, 759–762 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0185-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0185-y
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