ReDDDoT Phase 2: Climate-Informed Flood Risk Mitigation Sandbox

Floods are constantly threatening built environments and community well-being in the state of Louisiana. Floods will continue to worsen in the future with climate change. Communities must make critical decisions around flood risk mitigation and adaptation measures now.

This project tackles these pressing challenges around climate change and decision-making by developing and implementing an innovative, interactive flood mitigation software application platform. The platform is designed to allow stakeholders to explore, simulate, and evaluate current and future floodplain ordinance impacts on flood risk metrics. The project will design, develop, and deploy a novel, use-inspired flood mitigation sandbox software application to support risk-informed decision-making into the future.

The research team is composed of public, private, and academic partners, alongside decision-makers from five Louisiana parishes.

The project integrates various data sets, each contributing uniquely, and employs statistical techniques to comprehensively assess flood hazards, economic consequences, building vulnerability, and population impact. Through this project, these techniques combined will provide a holistic understanding of both current and future flood risk. The goal is to develop socially responsible and scientifically robust solutions by creating a flood mitigation sandbox tool that integrates community input with scientific research.

By engaging stakeholders in the co-production and evaluation of the mitigation measures and widely disseminating project progress across sectors, the approach will foster collaboration within the scientific community and empower stakeholders to adopt evidence-based approaches, driving positive change in resilience-building efforts. The project emphasizes clear risk communication and reproducible methods, ensuring that the results are widely applicable and beneficial to low-capacity communities.

This comprehensive approach will set new standards for flood risk management and community resilience, fostering collaboration and innovation across academic, industry, government, and non-profit sectors.

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.