EAGER: SAI: Community Perceptions of Flood Mitigation Strategies

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

Scientific research has shown that disadvantaged communities suffer disproportionately when it comes to natural disasters. These neighborhoods typically experience more extreme effects from natural disasters and longer recovery periods. Proposed solutions to these problems are often fraught with difficulties, including limited budgets, appeals to local industry, and even resistance from the local community.

The goal of this research is to better understand how communities make sense of their own risk to natural disasters and the solutions that have been proposed to improve outcomes in these disasters. Specifically, this project focuses on flood risk and proposed flood mitigation strategies in areas frequently experiencing catastrophic flood events. Flood mitigation strategies are often contentious as many of the proposals surrounding flood mitigation efforts imply a set of “winners” and “losers,” whereby flood mitigation in one area may imply an increased risk of flooding in another area.

These strategies may also imply a loss of homes or businesses in the process of redevelopment in flood-prone areas. Moreover, oftentimes the ways in which the public makes sense of their risk differs from the perspectives of local planners and engineers. This points to the need for community input and a better understanding of community opinions when planning flood mitigation strategies, both in long-term planning, as well as emergency protocols.

This project provides a better understanding of how community perceptions of flood mitigation strategies could better inform local policy and implementation of flood mitigation efforts. It also makes a scientific contribution to the research on social vulnerability and disaster broadly. Importantly, this research identifies the gap that exists between perception and function of infrastructure, which may lead to stronger future resilience in the face of natural disaster.

Extant research has examined social vulnerability to climate disasters, demonstrating that poor and minority communities have greater exposure to the negative effects of such events. However, little research has attempted to understand how objective risk of disaster relates to perceptions of risk and how communities make sense of public mitigation strategies.

This project combines these perspectives to examine how neighborhood perceptions of risk and mitigation relate to the physical infrastructure, the natural environment, and proposed plans to mitigate risk. Specifically, the project examines how these perceptions relate to flood risk and the flood mitigation infrastructure in Houston, Texas. The research involves collection of survey data on residents of the Houston area related to their perceptions of flood risk and opinions on proposed flood mitigation strategies.

These perceptions are overlayed onto data collected on objective indicators of environmental quality and infrastructure to help identify where there may be a mismatch between public perception and the function of built environments, which will lead to stronger future infrastructure. The primary goal of this project is to provide actionable research that will improve disaster mitigation strategies.

By incorporating both human understandings of risk, as well as engineering perspectives on proposed solutions, this research advances efforts to mitigate disasters in an equitable manner that engages the community. Most immediately, this work informs local and national efforts to mitigate the devastation of persistent flood events and may serve as a model for how to better understand and contextualize community understandings of flood risk and mitigation strategies.

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.