Large-scale CoPe: Coastal Hazards, Equity, Economic prosperity, and Resilience (CHEER)

Community resilience remains challenging to achieve in practice in part due to constraints imposed by the parallel, and sometimes competing, objectives of equity and economic prosperity, particularly in the context of climate change. To address this challenge, the Hub research goals are to: (1) Identify, explain, and quantify interactions and tradeoffs among the coastal community goals of equity, economic prosperity, and resilience to hazards; (2) Develop methods to model long-term hurricane hazards that account for climate change and integrate multiple hazards—wind, rain, storm surge, waves; and (3) Develop a computational framework to design and evaluate policy interventions that can achieve sustainable equity, economic prosperity, and coastal resilience in the context of climate change.

The new dynamic and spatial computational framework will consist of seven interacting modules describing the interactive decision-making of three stakeholder types--(1) households, (2) insurers, and (3) three levels of government; and the natural, built, and economic environments in which those decisions are made—(4) hazards, (5) damage/loss, (6) buildings, and (7) economy. The framework results will include: (a) recommended government policies designed with an awareness of how insurers and households are likely to respond; (b) outcomes for each stakeholder type including uncertainty and heterogeneity within them; and (c) based on those stakeholder-specific outcomes, assessments of community equity, economic prosperity, and resilience over time.

Hub research will focus on three case study areas—Eastern North Carolina; Port Arthur, TX; and Houston, TX. The computational framework will serve as the basis of a decision support tool, which will propel implementation of coastal resilience forward by addressing impediments that interactions with equity, economic prosperity, and climate change create, and capitalizing on the opportunities they present.

Close collaboration with practitioner and community partners will ensure the decision tool is useful to practitioners and advances the interests of communities. Just as the regional loss modeling framework provided a structure that has guided research for decades, the Hub’s framework can facilitate future interdisciplinary research that makes loss modeling dynamic and includes a rich representation of decision-making embedded in the relevant social and economic context.

More specific disciplinary advances include understanding how wind, rain, inland and coastal flooding hazards dynamically interact, including potential impacts under future climate scenarios; developing an automated, scalable method for creating a high resolution, detailed inventory of residential buildings; enhancing understanding of hurricanes’ effects on regional economies’ evolution; modeling interactions among levels of government; operationalizing multiple concepts of equity and their implications; and expanding understanding of renters’ and mobile home residents’ experiences with risk and risk management. The Hub will implement a comprehensive, research-based mentoring program, including quick response fieldwork training, and will broaden participation of students through partnerships with the McNair Scholars Program and Bill Anderson Fund, national organizations supporting graduate students from underrepresented groups.

The Hub will engage other researchers and the public through development of discipline primers and DRC IT! modules; workshops within the case study communities; and the HurriCon II conference. Partnerships with SimCenter, DesignSafe-CI, and the Disaster Research Center will help ensure sustainability.

This project is jointly funded by the Coastlines & People (CoPe) program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

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.