Assessing the Intersectional Risks Associated with the Full Life Cycle of the U.S. Housing Stock

Abstract

This work presents the most comprehensive framework to date to assess the intersectional risks associated with design and policy decisions regarding the built environment. This framework is applied to decisions regarding the selection of hazard mitigation measures to apply, households to prioritize in hazard mitigation grant programs, and construction materials to use in efforts to reduce societal greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

To study these decisions, a computation inexpensive method is developed to compute expected damages associated with each individual building in a community with hurricane wind exposure. This method is applied to study the cost burden of expected damages on each individual household. Later, this is integrated into building life cycle assessment (LCA) to incorporate hazard vulnerability into building embodied emissions. Lastly, building LCA is extended to inform the sectoral environmental footprint (SEF) of construction material sectors.

Together, the model results of this work show that expected damages are currently underestimated, socially-vulnerable groups are likelier to be priced out hazard repairs, and ignoring use and end-of-life stages leads to ignoring the largest portion of building life cycle emissions as well as the largest contributors of the SEF of construction materials. By reevaluating the performance of the housing stock under each metric, strategies are proposed to prevent monetary damages, redistribute the cost burden of remaining monetary damages, and couple considerations for climate mitigation and climate adaptation by promoting disaster risk reduction as a pathway towards GHG abatement.