Focused CoPe: Fundamental research to inform holistic decision-making for historically underrepresented communities impacted by coastal hazards

Coastal communities increasingly experience disasters due to a combination of acute and chronic hazards, including hurricanes, tsunamis, coastal storm surges, flooding, sea level rise and erosion. Enhancing community resilience to these hazards requires planning and effective use of community resources, but also new knowledge on the dynamic interplay among coastal hazards, built environment, geodemographics, and social as well as cultural factors.

Particularly at risk are tribal communities along the Northern Gulf Coast, from Texas to Florida, that face similar risks as non-tribal coastal communities do but are also confronted with additional risks such as multi-hazard damages or entire loss of historical properties/sites and cultural heritage, as well as their autonomous areas that may host cultural rituals or grow traditional environmental products needed for economic and cultural traditions. This project will inform the creation of science- and evidence-based decision-making strategies and future hazard mitigation plans for marginalized communities that will be readily implementable to Northern Gulf Coast tribal communities.

The research outcomes are expected to be both transferable to other locations and scalable. Through an integrative and convergent research approach, this Hub will establish an interdisciplinary framework to quantify the interdependence among coastal hazards, built environment, geodemographics, and social and cultural factors, thus informing holistic decision-making aimed at minimizing the socio-economic impact of coastal hazards to historically underrepresented communities.

This project, via community events, surveys, roundtables and discussion forums, will identify critical community needs, priorities, and concerns, determine key issues, co-collect data and solicit expertise, co-develop and refine research and create evaluation metrics. This framework will be validated with empirical data collected from tribal communities in the Northern Gulf Coast and cultural preservation sites through engaged research and experiential drills in order to understand, assess, measure, and enhance resilience.

The proposed research will result in a diverse set of models and decision-making tools for measuring Coastal Hazards Impact, Infrastructure Damages, Evacuation Performance, and Social Vulnerability which will all be integrated through engaged participatory research into a community resource to evaluate and optimize various adaptation and mitigation strategies and prioritize policy levers. This project will develop an engagement program to support a pipeline for high school students from tribal communities into and through graduate school.

This project will achieve a novel transdisciplinary integration of anthropology, archeology, urban planning and engineering disciplines via community engaged research. In doing so, the project will establish and sustain effective partnerships with tribal communities to pursue a systematic approach that promotes social trust to ensure community-driven research questions and decision-making are incorporated in this project.

The research objectives are to: (1) Quantify coastal and coast-induced hazards; (2) Quantify the impacts of hazards on physical and social infrastructure; (3) Measure community evacuation capabilities and identify gaps for informed decision-making and emergency planning; (4) Develop theoretical-driven methods for collection and analysis of various data types and local perspectives on adaptation of social and physical infrastructure systems, and (5) Optimize and prioritize community decision-making to mitigate impacts and improve adaptation of communities according to their needs. The core community-engaged data collection will uniquely address the modeling need for quantified data on how tribal communities experience and perceive coastal hazards, how to respond to such hazards, as well as cartographic expressions (GIS maps) of at-risk resources and infrastructure.

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.