Large-Scale CoPe: The Cascadia Coastlines and People Hazards Research Hub

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

In response to the direct call by Pacific Northwest coastal communities for “a coordinated research agenda among universities, governmental agencies, NGOs, and others” to help them achieve resilience, the Cascadia Coastlines and Peoples Hazards Research Hub (Cascadia CoPes hub) will inform and enable integrated hazard assessment, mitigation, and adaptation—including comprehensive planning, policy informing, and engineering—through targeted scientific advances in collaboration with communities. Cascadia coastlines and peoples face the risk of large earthquakes, tsunami inundation, landslides and erosion aggravated by atmospheric rivers, changing storm patterns and sea level rise. Cascadia coastal communities also have rich and diverse cultural, social and governance histories, traditional and local ecological knowledge (TEK/LEK), and identities, values, and economies tied to their coastal locations and ecosystems. These distinguishing features position the Cascadia CoPes hub to transform understanding of the timelines and interactions of near-term and long-term coastal changes. The Cascadia CoPes hub will engage communities in co-production and train a new generation of coastal hazards scientists and leaders from communities in the region. Cascadia provides a natural laboratory for the study of local coastal changes spanning time scales from minutes to millennia, reflecting complex and locally-specific layering of impacts from chronic and acute hazards. The Cascadia CoPes hub is designed to test two overarching hypotheses: (1) fundamental advances in convergent coastal hazard sciences will transform understanding of the risks coastal communities face and (2) a co-produced approach to advancing hazard assessment and mitigation will increase coastal communities’ capacity to reduce disaster risk and broaden participation across the region. With collaborations representing the breadth of Cascadia coastlines and peoples, the project will: (a) identify likely sources of earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, and land-level change, integrate new observations and develop coupled event simulations based on novel probabilistic tectonic multi-hazard risk models; (b) assess compound fluvial-coastal flooding and how these drive coastal morphology changes and ecosystems, to quantify probabilistic exposure to coastal hazards under present and future conditions; (c) assess risk mitigation and dynamic adaptation strategies, including use of natural and nature-based features, (d) identify and test multi-use and asset-focused adaptation strategies for disaster risk reduction in processes that incorporate TEK/LEK, (e) study of coastal governance structures for hazards resilience and science-informed hazards response, and (f) explore the conceptual linkages and communications challenges across (a-e). 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.