Planning: CHIRRP: Simulating Coastal Adaptation and Local Exposure for Enhanced Resilience

Since 1980, the US has experienced more than $2.7 trillion in costs due to climate-related disasters. It includes sea-level rise driven by global climate change, which poses substantial and persistent threats to coastal communities, home to approximately 40% of the nation's population. The projected global and regional sea-level rise predicts elevated risks but lacks local embeddedness, community engagement, and actionability.

This project will develop researcher-community partnerships to co-produce a new decision-support toolkit to help visualize, test, and prioritize localized adaptation and mitigation strategies to improve coastal resilience. It will advance knowledge of hazard risk modeling and resilience planning, being rooted in place-based participatory approaches to integrate local stakeholder knowledge and experiences in conceptualizing, designing, and assessing potential solutions, which are fundamental to achieving resilient communities.

By engaging frontline organizations in co-development processes, this project will increase cross-sectoral partnerships that will have broader impacts through regional-to-local knowledge translation, develop capacity, and lead to more synergistic resilience policies. It will also include training of graduate student researchers and incorporate lessons into a cross-disciplinary curriculum on sustainability and resilience to reach a larger audience.

The project will contribute to broadening participation in higher education and workforce development for next-generation scholars and practitioners.

Within the context of coastal resilience to sea-level rise, there is little evidence-based research on modeling the effects of local adaptation and mitigation policies on hazard risk reduction. This project will provide innovative earth system science modeling tools to examine the dynamic interactions between resilience strategies across different spatial, temporal, and organizational scales and evaluate their expected benefits and trade-offs, with a focus on addressing underlying social inequalities and vulnerabilities.

Project activities and methods include: (1) developing equitable partnerships with resilience policymakers in Greater Miami, FL, including local governments and community-based organizations using iterative mapping and snowball sampling methods; (2) deconstructing and mapping the complex network of grey infrastructure and nature-based solutions across spatiotemporal scales and hierarchies using participatory workshop and co-development methods; and (3) rigorously designing and evaluating an integrative dashboard solution using focus groups and research translation workshops to inform modeling frameworks, questions, and social benefits that frame how the project can support pathways to resilience. Ultimately, this project will deliver actionable, science-based solutions to assist policymakers in evaluating the effectiveness of various sea-level rise hazard risk-reduction measures and exploring interactive scenarios and future pathways to enhance community resilience and improve well-being.

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.