Benchmarking Plans for Community-Based Small Business Resilience across Gulf Coast Counties

Abstract

Community-based small businesses (CSBs) bear the brunt of environmental hazards aggravated by climate change, thus requiring appended community support. This research addresses the knowledge gap in the increasingly convergent field of hazard and climate adaptation planning research. It aims to benchmark the commitments of local plans toward CSB resilience (CSB-R). We develop a CSB-R Framework with eleven planning objectives across five dimensions and evaluate relevant plans of fifty-six Gulf Coast counties using a Natural Language Processing method. Our evaluation results outline the inadequate planning focus on CSB-R that is distinct by community contexts, which requires tailored improvement strategies accordingly.