Large-scale CoPe: Coastal Hazards, Economic prosperity, and Resilience

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

Coastal community resilience remains challenging to achieve due to constraints imposed by the parallel, and sometimes competing, objectives of economic prosperity for renters and homeowners. To address this challenge, the Hub research goals are to: (1) Identify, explain, and quantify interactions and tradeoffs among the coastal community goals of economic prosperity and resilience to hazards; (2) Develop methods to model long-term hurricane hazards that integrate multiple hazards—wind, rain, storm surge, waves; and (3) Develop a computational framework to design and evaluate policy interventions that can achieve sustainable economic prosperity and coastal resilience in the context of changing risks. The Hub’s framework can facilitate future interdisciplinary research that makes loss modeling dynamic and includes a rich representation of decision-making embedded in the relevant social and economic context. Close collaboration with practitioner and community partners will ensure the decision support tool is useful to practitioners and advances the interests of communities. Hub research will focus on three case study areas—Eastern North Carolina; Port Arthur, TX; and Houston, TX. This project will advance the understanding of the interactions of hurricanes and coastal process, and impacts on physical, economic and social systems. The Hub will implement a comprehensive, research-based mentoring program, including quick response fieldwork training, and will broaden participation of students. This project is jointly funded by the Coastlines & People (CoPe) program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). 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.