A new study by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and collaborators highlights a sharp contrast between urban and suburban ways of thinking about coastal ecosystems.
The authors of the study used statistical and cognitive science techniques to analyze data from a survey of 1,400 residents across the U.S. East Coast. Their results, published in the journal npj Urban Sustainability, showed that surveyed residents of urban centers often held a more simplistic, and less realistic, understanding of coastal ecosystems than residents in suburban areas. The research also uncovered a lower propensity to take pro-environmental actions among urban populations. The study provides evidence for an issue the authors refer to as urbanized knowledge syndrome, which may be detrimental to natural ecosystems and hamper community resilience to natural disasters.
“We’re hypothesizing that urbanization is not only impacting the ecological dimension of the system, but also the social dimension of the system, which may, in turn, cause people to disengage from positive environmental behavior. It’s something of a snowball effect,” said Payam Aminpour, a NIST postdoctoral research fellow and lead author of the study.
As part of NIST’s Community Resilience Program, Aminpour and his colleagues were particularly interested in gaining a better understanding of what drives decisions surrounding resilience and adaptation measures in urban areas. As a result of a survey devised and distributed by study co-authors at Northeastern University, they have been able to take a significant stride in the right direction.
The survey was targeted at coastal counties in metropolitan areas across eight states, each of which featured shorelines with varying densities of roads, sea walls, ditches and other “gray” infrastructure. On the National Center for Health Statistics’ six-level urban-rural classification scheme, surveyed residents largely resided in the three most urban levels, ranging from city centers to suburbs.
The list of questions was designed to extract information about respondents’ demographics, understanding of ecosystems and whether or not they had partaken in a list of pro-environmental activities, including voting for political candidates based on environmental stances, voicing complaints to government agencies, contributing to conservation groups and other actions.
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