CAREER: Integrated Modeling of Flood Interdependencies and Adaptation Responses to Evaluate Pathways for Coastal Community Resilience

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project supports research on understanding how compound flood mechanisms influence decision making about shoreline adaptation in multi-jurisdictional governance systems and how feedbacks from those decisions modify spatiotemporal patterns of flooding risk. Compound flooding from coastal and terrestrial sources presents a serious threat to coastal communities and is predicted to worsen in the future.

Coastal managers, elected officials, and policy makers at local and regional levels are grappling with a host of issues related to reducing the impacts of flooding on people and built environment. Their decisions about how to adapt have crucial implications, and, in some cases, may lead to new patterns of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability.

Despite inherent connectivity between coastal-terrestrial processes and human decision making in defining flood hazards, the feedbacks between these processes and their influence on future risk in coastal communities are not well understood. This project develops an integrated modeling framework to examine the emergent behavior that arises due to the interactions among local and regional decision makers.

It also investigates the role of regional actors in forming effective flood adaptation approaches. Specific research activities include (i) a survey of stakeholders’ adaptation preferences given information about flood interdependencies, (ii) development of an integrated modeling framework that couples compound flood assessment with multi-agent simulation of decision making, and (iii) evaluation of the role of multi-level actors in regional adaptation planning.

The project designs and implements new educational opportunities for undergraduate students to engage in interdisciplinary coursework and research experiences related to the modeling of coupled human and natural systems. Findings from the research will increase awareness of interdependencies between flood hazards and adaptive responses among coastal managers and inform planning efforts on reducing regional flood risk.

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.