RAISE: CHIRRP: Empowering Climate Resilience (ECR): Confronting Coastal Hazards for Rural and Indigenous Communities (CCHRIC) in the Great Lakes Region

This project combines natural hazard research with local knowledge to create practical tools and strategies to help anticipate, prepare for, and respond to natural hazards in the Great Lakes Region. This area is increasingly facing heavier snowfall, stronger storms, and extreme heatwaves. These changing conditions are often linked to hazards like flooding, landslides, and wildfires.

Rural, remote, and Indigenous communities are especially at risk. These areas tend to be geographically isolated, with limited resources and aging infrastructure. The team will work with local governments, Tribal Nations, and community members to develop user-friendly risk assessment tools, data visualization platforms, and training materials.

Resulting hazard-assessment tools will promote long-term resilience and an improved quality of life for people who live and work in the Great Lakes Region.

A unified Earth system approach will transform scientific insights and local knowledge into actionable solutions. Researchers and local residents will co-bridge the gap between advanced natural hazard science and community needs for resilience against coastal hazard impacts. The project will further scientific understanding of regional Earth systems and support solutions to natural hazard-related problems.

Focused on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this research employs a fully coupled atmosphere-land-lake modeling framework to investigate how feedback mechanisms among Earth system components shape local conditions. High-resolution climate simulations, spanning historical and future periods, will be used to quantify changes in weather patterns and the resulting impacts.

The implications for community-level hazards will be examined using modeling and analysis. Hazard assessments will be integrated into the open-access Rural Hazard Resilience Tools platform, enabling stakeholders to visualize risks and plan adaptive strategies. The project engages local governments and residents throughout the process to identify barriers and challenges they face from extreme hazards, ensuring that scientific insights directly inform policies and local actions.

By bridging geosciences, engineering, and social science, this project provides a deeper understanding of regional Earth systems. It also provides practical, locally tailored solutions to enhance community resilience to natural hazard impacts.

This project is jointly funded by the Division of Research, Innovation, Synergies, and Education in the Directorate for Geosciences and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure through the National Discovery Cloud for Climate initiative.

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.