NRT: Community Resilience to Cascading Impacts of Extreme Events and Geohazards Across Scales Through Engaged Scholarship and Learning

Portland State University, Portland OR

Investigators

Abstract

Many climate-related natural hazards such as floods, droughts, and wildfires are increasing in frequency around the globe, disrupting critical infrastructure and diminishing human well-being. These problems are exacerbated by social and technological factors including poor land use planning, aging infrastructure, and loose social cohesion. Combining these hazards with each other or with geologic risks such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions can multiply their devastating impacts on society. Recent examples in the Western United States include prolonged droughts followed by mega wildfires and extreme flooding. Understanding causes, consequences, and human responses to these compound hazards requires versatile skills ranging from communication, computational, and systems thinking to translate knowledge to action. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to Portland State University (PSU) will develop a transformative graduate training program for addressing and identifying solutions for cascading hazards. The project will build on community-engaged transdisciplinary collaboration among diverse faculty from departments across three colleges: atmospheric science, computer science, geotechnical engineering, geosciences, urban studies and planning, and environmental social sciences. The project anticipates training 22 NRT-funded trainees and 100 additional students participating in at least one element of the program. This NRT program will produce a highly competent and responsive workforce with broad technological, scientific, and social skills necessary to address challenges. This project proposes to develop a transdisciplinary training program that uses a social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) framework while addressing ethics and risk communication issues as part of learning. The primary goal is to develop responsive curricula that allow flexible pathways for the next generation of scientists, managers, and practitioners in the field of disaster management and community resilience by actively engaging with diverse stakeholders from city practitioners, federal agencies, civic organizations, and private industries using a collaborative governance model. Using PSU as an initial testbed for building community resilience, NRT students will extend the gained understandings and best practices to help urban and rural communities by engaging with diverse community partners and being co-mentored by a group of participating faculty with various expertise. Potential research topics include 1) identifying challenges, opportunities, and solutions for implementing community resilience planning at PSU campus and extend across sectors and scales, 2) understanding and modeling cascading effects of climatic and other geohazards and identifying potential SETS solutions in urban communities, and 3) using drone technology, science communication, and climate information to improve understanding of and solving heat and wildfire-related risks in rural communities, with an eye to and scaling those up to engage other communities elsewhere. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. 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.