Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Advancing Resilience in Low Income Housing Using Climate-Change Science and Big Data Analytics

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This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries to address the growing need for assessment and reduction of disaster risk, collaborative co-design of resilience strategies with a breadth of stakeholders, and scientifically and technologically enhanced responses to disasters. This project seeks to enhance the resilience of low-income communities living in disaster prone areas. The focus is on low-lying coastal zones that have high risks of droughts and floods in selected parts of Brazil, East Africa and North America. It develops the geographic and socio-economic knowledge of persons living in economically depressed and riverbed areas by gathering georeferenced data on infrastructures and natural heritage of potential sites. The project team will use machine learning and big data analytical approaches to identify optimal disaster resilient-housing urban design and planning packages considering projected climate change related extreme weather scenarios until 2050. The project will investigate potential barriers to technology adoption through designing and prototyping an affordable, disaster-resilient, low-income housing system that use sustainable locally resourced materials.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.