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Social vulnerability and population loss in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria

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• Published: 02 May 2023
• Volume 45 , article number  8 , ( 2023 )

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• Jocelyn West   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6805-0616 1  

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Communities in Puerto Rico saw their populations shrink after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Of the archipelago’s 884 populated census tracts, 613 tracts (69.3%) experienced a net population loss with an average loss of 161 people. To understand the relationship between social vulnerability and post-disaster population loss, informed by theories of environmental migration, I compare a measure of social vulnerability in Puerto Rico to population change in each tract. This study also provides an opportunity to evaluate the validity of the social vulnerability index (SVI) in Puerto Rico. Through six spatial regression models, I find that the current 15-variable SVI significantly predicts greater population loss for more vulnerable areas in Puerto Rico, in which the most vulnerable tracts lost 81 more people than tracts at the median. However, a revised 10-variable SVI—created after factor analysis by removing variables for mobile homes, group quarters, multi-unit dwellings, minority status, and limited English proficiency—produces an even larger effect size when predicting population loss, in which the most vulnerable tracts lost about 175 more people than the least vulnerable. Results suggest that a 10-variable SVI may have higher construct validity for the context of Puerto Rico and could become a foundation for a measure that better reflects local experiences with disaster. This is the first study to test the relationship between a social vulnerability index and post-disaster population change in Puerto Rico. These findings highlight the need for further investigation of the link between social vulnerability and post-disaster migration and underscore the importance of context-specific measures of social vulnerability.

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(Source: Author, using data from the CDC and U.S. Census Bureau)

(Source: Author, using NOAA data)

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks David Eitelberg and three anonymous reviewers for their contributions to improving this article.

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (#2040434), the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Natural Hazards Center NSF Award #1635593.

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Below are alternatives to this article’s spatial regression models. The first set of six OLS models in Table 3 uses absolute population change as the dependent variable, and the second uses percent change in population as the dependent variable in Table 4 . The level of significance for all models is consistent with those in Table 2 , except for model 3, which was not significant in the spatial model. For the SVI-10 model, the most vulnerable tracts experienced a population loss 3.98 percentage points greater than that of the least vulnerable tracts, on average. The general equation for the following models is as follows:

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West, J. Social vulnerability and population loss in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Popul Environ 45 , 8 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-023-00418-3

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