SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: Community Resilience Micro-Bonds to Balance Cost and Social Equity among Stakeholders

The US government invests $1 billion annually in hazard mitigation, but the resilience investment gap for the US is estimated to exceed $520 billion. The resilience gap across different communities and population groups is widening due to growing economic inequality in the US, which is further exacerbated by hazard events which turn into disasters. Therefore, finding innovative strategies and methods to fund socially equitable resilience improvements is essential for communities to thrive and survive.

Catastrophe Bonds and Disaster Resilience Bonds are fairly mainstream topics and are used as a mechanism to raise money from investors for infrastructure improvement, but less attention is paid to social equity, a factor that underpins community resilience. A community is made up of more than the physical parts of the infrastructure and involves people, relationships, networks, all working as part of social institutions such as schools, hospitals, and service entities.

Therefore, in this project, a new type of bonds, termed herein as a Coastal Community Resilience Micro-Bonds (CCRMB), will be implemented.

In this project, innovative strategies and methods to fund socially equitable resilience improvements, which are essential for communities to thrive and survive, will be developed and implemented. Infrastructure-focused bonds are helpful for communities, but still leave a substantial gap in the disaster resilience bond paradigm, because repair of physical infrastructure is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for community resilience.

The goal of this CIVIC Innovation Challenge grant is to promote the contributions of various sectors and financial agents of a community to invest in resilience initiatives and provide innovative mechanisms for them to do so. By leveraging the CCRMB, equitable recovery of both physical and social services and institutions can be achieved through staged and comprehensive planning and investment prior to disasters.

To accomplish this requires interdisciplinary modeling of the multiple hazards experienced by coastal communities, and the city of Charleston, SC will be the focus community for implementation of the proposed CCRMB. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program, Track B—Resilience to Natural Disasters—and is a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Homeland Security.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.