Planning: CHIRRP: Strengthening Community Resilience to Flood Hazards

River floods in hilly and mountainous areas have caused billions of dollars in damage to homes, businesses, roads and bridges over recent decades. Local communities and planners rely on flood hazard maps to identify areas at risk of being submerged in river floods. However, floodwater scouring of the land beneath roads, bridges and buildings causes the most damage during floods in steep river valleys, and current flood hazard maps need to be updated to account for this risk. Furthermore, communities affected by recent floods have enacted various measures to reduce the damage from future floods, but it is unclear which of these measures are most effective in hilly and mountainous regions. Developing effective solutions to these problems requires close partnerships between scientists, communities most impacted by river floods, and professionals engaged in flood hazard planning. In this two-year project, three workshops are convened to build and strengthen partnerships, collect information about recent floods, and identify the most pressing research questions related to river flooding. The research team includes undergraduate and postdoctoral researchers. Data products and analysis are provided to communities to aid in decision-making and planning. This project has four goals: (1) strengthen partnerships and develop relationships with community organizations relevant to river flood hazards; (2) co-develop with community partners a suite of critical research questions in the broad areas of flood erosion hazards, flood adaptation solutions, and implementation challenges; (3) develop a database of flood erosion impacts and flood adaptation measures for local communities; and (4) identify effective strategies for sharing climate and flood data with communities. This project uses a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach to build equitable community partnerships, and involves the participation from community members, organizations representing those most vulnerable to flooding, and actors engaged in flood hazard planning. 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.