Community-Based Solutions to Enhance Disaster Resilience

The awards for Track B are:

·  Artificial-Intelligence-based Decision Support for Equitable and Resilient Food Distribution during Pandemics and Extreme Weather Events, led by the University of Houston, will develop and evaluate solutions such as a predictive tool for infrastructure vulnerability and a decision-making tool for determining food distribution hub locations and food allocations.

·  Community-Centric Pre-Disaster Mitigation with Unmanned Aerial and Marine Systems, led by the Texas A&M University Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas, will train and mentor at-risk high school students in three urban and rural school districts to collect and analyze aerial and underwater imagery for vulnerable areas identified by emergency management.

·  Hoomalu Halelea - Community-led Innovation for Integrated Flood Resilience, led by the University of Hawai’i, will add weather stations to fill in monitoring gaps and operate workshops, training and field trips to enhance resilience to increased flood risk in coastal watersheds.

·  Unification for Underground Resilience Measures, led by New York University, will work with utility companies, city agencies and consultants to design a roadmap for city-level implementation of a subsurface data model and assemble two pilot data sets to prepare study sites against natural disasters.

·  Visualizing Resilience: BIPOC Youth Advocacy through Mapmaking, led by Georgia Tech, will deliver the Youth Advocacy for Resilience Disasters curriculum with the Map Spot for joint creation of large-format maps to support youth in advocating for infrastructure projects in their communities.

·  Helping Rural Counties to Enhance Flooding and Coastal Disaster Resilience and Adaptation, led by Michigan Technological University, will work with two counties in Upper Michigan to develop methods that use remote sensing data and citizen scientists to address data gaps and improve flood hazard modeling.

·  Low-Cost Efficient Wireless Intelligent Sensors for Greater Preparedness and Resilience to Post-Wildfire Flooding in Native American Communities, led by The University of New Mexico, will deploy more than 100 sensors and make the data available through an online portal, and will incorporate training modules into education curriculums.

·  Rural Resiliency Hubs: An Integrated, Community-Centered Approach to Addressing the Resiliency Divide through Rural Public Libraries, led by a multi-disciplinary Florida State University team, will pilot a community-based design process for tailored resiliency hub sites in rural public libraries and facilitated by rural public librarians. Each hub design will reflect the input and priorities of local citizens, county officials, civic organizations, and additional community stakeholders.

·  CaReDeX: Enabling Disaster Resilience in Aging Communities via a Secure Data Exchange, led by the University of California, Irvine, will aim to enhance the resilience of older adults in disasters through the creation of a pilot edge data exchange platform that allows real-time exchange of critical care information between caregivers at senior housing facilities and authorized responders.

·  Convergence, Inventory, Matching, and Assignment to Optimize Post-event Housing Repair for Displaced Vulnerable Populations, led by Old Dominion University, will field a platform for use by nonprofit organizations. The platform will increase efficiency in matching supply of converging donated material and volunteer labor with the repair needs of displaced households.

·  Inclusive Insurance: Improving the Post-Flood Financial Resiliency of Low- and Moderate-Income Households, led by the Wharton Risk Center at the University of Pennsylvania, will harness innovative insurance pilots to better protect lower-income households from escalating flood risk.

“Teams funded in Stage 2 will play a vital role in developing novel resilience strategies and solutions to the escalating threat of natural disasters facing vulnerable communities across the country,” said David J. Alexander, Senior Science Advisor for Resilience, DHS Science and Technology Directorate. “As climate change accelerates the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, DHS is proud to support the efforts of this program to enhance the nation’s resiliency.”

The NSF notes that the focus areas of projects in Track A and Track B were developed with input from communities across the country who participated in an Ideas Festival in 2019, together with researchers, federal agencies, and other organizations.