Forecasting Human Mobility and Development Driven by Future Flood Hazard Conditions

Overview

Projecting human mobility and shifts in development patterns in response to future flooding is crucial for anticipating the need for policies and/or investments that protect lives, livelihoods, and property. Land change science and modeling offer opportunities to predict conditions under future scenarios of climate and land change. We present the first spatially interactive (i.e., what happens at one location affects another) land change model (FUTURES 3.0) that can probabilistically predict urban growth while simulating human migration and other responses to flooding, essentially depicting the geography of impact and response. Here, we forecast how flood hazards in one region (Charleston, South Carolina) can impact development patterns and trigger wide-scale human migration across the United States.