SAI: Integrating Equity in Emergency Management of Critical Infrastructure

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.

Every year, wildfires in the United States cause many deaths and bring enormous economic loss. The frequency and harm caused by wildfires are projected to grow with changes in the climate and shifting population centers. Wildfires represent a significant threat to critical infrastructure systems.

These challenges are compounded by the observation that rural and disadvantaged communities are often the most susceptible to wildfire disasters. Although significant progress has been made in predicting wildfire propagation, less is known about the complex interactions between wildfires, socially vulnerable populations, and emergency management practices.

This SAI project focuses on strengthening the emergency management of critical infrastructure systems, with special attention to the disproportionate societal impacts of wildfires. Specifically, this project integrates social scientific theories with mathematical models to yield novel insights into the design and improvement of emergency management of critical infrastructure systems.

The goal is to develop a new assessment framework and an integrative decision model that enhances the human-centered governance of such systems.

One critical challenge in this area is understanding how essential services, such as electricity, water, and transportation, might fail due to their strong interdependencies when facing a wildfire. Another major challenge is that the needs of socially vulnerable communities residing at the interface between wildlands and urban areas are often unseen.

As a result, the disproportionate impacts of wildfire-induced critical infrastructure failures on these communities are not adequately considered in emergency planning and practices. This SAI project aims to develop a human-centered, equity-focused, risk-informed decision-making framework to address these challenges. The research develops equity-aware and interpretable models and computational algorithms related to vulnerability assessment and efficient post-wildfire recovery strategies of interdependent critical infrastructure systems under deep uncertainties.

It also evaluates the social burden of wildfire-induced critical infrastructure service disruptions on rural and disadvantaged communities and effectively integrates it with the new emergency management decision model. The project brings together expertise and resources from a network of researchers in the social sciences, engineering, and public policy, along with stakeholders from multiple institutions, public and private agencies, non-profit organizations, and local communities.

This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences and the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

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.