Planning: CHIRRP: Engagement and Mitigation for Building Resilience Against Cascading Events in Puerto Rico

Interconnected environmental processes influence the initiation and propagation of cascading hazards (e.g., hurricanes, extreme rainfall, floods, landslides) that pose significant risks to infrastructure, ecosystems, and human populations. This threat is particularly acute in underserved communities, which lack sufficient resources, infrastructure, and services to adequately prepare for, respond to, and recover from such hazards. Risk responses at the individual and collective level are hampered not just by a lack of data on the science underlying cascading hazards and specific social and physical vulnerabilities in underserved communities, but by the need for inclusive knowledge formation and decision-making processes. This project collaborates with communities to formulate research questions, conceptualize actionable solutions, and co-produce a research program that advances scientific knowledge, builds community capacity, and reduces vulnerability to the impacts of cascading hazards in a changing climate. While our understanding of cascading hazards shapes the research, there is a need for a strategic shift from response and recovery to preparedness, proactive risk management, and the ability to adapt. This planning project establishes the foundations for enhancing the capacity of geographers, geoscientists, social scientists, and community leaders to effectively evaluate and mitigate the evolving impacts and risks of cascading hazards on underserved communities. Broader impacts include building equitable community partnerships to ensure that the research is grounded in real-world applications and responsive to the needs of the communities it serves, as well as providing interdisciplinary scientific and technical training and experience in community engagement for graduate students. The overarching goal of this planning project is to lay the groundwork for collaboratively developing a set of fundamental research questions and establishing long-term collaboration in three communities in Puerto Rico to shape and account for the effective investment of federal and local resources. It advances the science, theory, and practice necessary to equitably co-produce project research questions and solutions, and explore dynamic interactions and couplings among natural and social processes affecting the resilience of Puerto Rican communities. First, it contributes to co-production literature by empirically categorizing differing perspectives on how participants view its processes and outcomes. Second, it contributes to Earth system science literature by assessing how sequential hazards may drive one another and how the consequences of cascading hazards may scale temporally and spatially. Third, it extends knowledge on how co-production outcomes may relate to changes in social capital and impact federal and territorial policies and guidance. 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.