CLIMA/Collaborative Research: Riders on the Storm: Climate Adaptation of Housing Infrastructure for Resilient Communities in Coastal Cities

This CiviL Infrastructure research for climate change Mitigation and Adaptation (CLIMA) project supports research on housing infrastructure adaptation in coastal communities exposed to natural hazards in a changing climate. This project develops a novel mathematical framework to analyze interactions between collective human behavior, built environments, and natural hazards that can speed up retrofit and repair of homes or lead to more out-migration after disasters. It helps at-risk communities identify pathways to become more resilient. In addition, the project offers opportunities for student training in interdisciplinary methods in engineering and social science and aims for broad dissemination of results to engineers, scientists, and policymakers. This project puts forward convergent research that draws methods from civil engineering, urban and network science, and social science to hone an interpretable and scalable mathematical framework. The project uses a network perspective to study human-infrastructure interactions and enhance the understanding of collective human behavior in climate adaptation in three main thrusts. First, the project builds on fieldwork and migration theory to develop a probabilistic dynamic model for single-household actions, including structural (home retrofits and repairs) and non-structural interventions (people’s resettlement). Second, the project studies emergent collective behavior through statistically principled approaches, field research, and refined and extended disaster datasets. Third, the project extends the probabilistic formulation from single-household adaptability to community adaptability towards improved estimation of community resilience to coastal hazards. Overall, this project distills sociotechnical insights into using interpretable and scalable methods to illuminate pathways for community adaptation to climate change. 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.