SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: Rural Resiliency Hubs: A Planning Approach to Addressing the Resiliency Divide

公共图书馆为农村居民提供重要的信息、服务和支持，以抵御逆境。许多地方、州和联邦机构使用公共图书馆作为援助分发点、志愿者接待中心、庇护所和临时办公场所。虽然灾害恢复研究主要集中在城市环境，但农村环境具有不同的、未得到充分研究的特征。农村地区相当大的地理差异也使得“复原力鸿沟”在自然灾害的后果中显现出来，比如2018年的“迈克尔”飓风。因此，该项目的目标是研究和制定适合农村社区独特需求的应急计划，其指导思想是：了解社区行为者、人口需求、环境、信息和基础设施之间的相互依存关系，从而提高农村社区应急行动的效率，从而制定成功的战略和政策，优化多方面的灾害应对。为了解决抗灾能力的鸿沟，本项目将探讨三个研究问题：(1)社区行为者、人口需求、环境、信息和基础设施之间的相互作用如何促进农村社区的抗灾能力？此外，农村利益相关者和居民如何看待这一体系下的公共图书馆？(2)社会、空间、环境和基础设施因素对社区恢复力的相互依赖和相互联系如何进行测量和建模，以揭示农村社区恢复力的差异？(3)如何利用农村图书馆作为应对自然灾害的弹性中心来弥合这种弹性鸿沟？此外，在灾难恢复系统中促进图书馆的政策和基础设施问题是什么？这些问题将通过异构数据收集和融合，以及通过开发多网络弹性指标和多变量优先风险图来探索。项目团队将确定在佛罗里达州卡尔霍恩县研究区域设计弹性中心的关键问题、挑战和障碍，并制定社会经济和人口数学指标，以考虑基础设施特征、社会因素、土地利用和其他当地条件。该小组将使用基于地理信息系统的工具创建脆弱性地图，以确定卡尔霍恩县的高需求地点，这将得到图书馆社区外展的支持，以教育居民了解可用的服务。地图还将为移动应急响应图书馆中心位置的空间优化模型提供信息。该项目的研究成果、社区参与方法和基于实践的解决方案可以推广到其他灾害易发的农村地区。这个项目是对公民创新挑战项目——Track B-Resilience to Natural disaster的回应，是NSF和国土安全部之间的合作项目。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Public libraries provide rural citizens with critical information, services, and support to withstand adversity. Numerous local, state, and federal agencies use public libraries as aid distribution points, volunteer reception centers, shelters, and temporary office spaces. While disaster resilience research has focused primarily on urban settings, rural environments have different, understudied, characteristics. The considerable geographical variability in rural areas has also made the “resilience divide” apparent in natural disasters’ aftermath, such as 2018’s Hurricane Michael. As such, the goal of this project is to study and develop emergency plans that fit distinct needs of rural communities, guided by a central hypothesis: Understanding interdependencies among the community actors, population needs, environment, information, and infrastructure that foster emergency operations efficacy in rural communities can lead to the successful strategies and policies for optimizing multi-faceted disaster response. To address the resilience divide, this project will explore three research questions: (1) What interactions between community actors, population needs, environment, information, and infrastructure foster disaster resilience in rural communities? Additionally, how do rural stakeholders and residents view public libraries in this system? (2) How can the interdependency and interconnectivity between social, spatial, environmental, and infrastructural factors in community resilience be measured and modeled to reveal the divide in resilience for rural communities? (3) How can this resiliency divide be bridged by using rural libraries as resiliency hubs for natural disaster response? Additionally, what are the policy and infrastructural issues relating to promoting libraries in a disaster resilience system? The questions will be explored via heterogeneous data collection and fusion and by developing multi-network resilience metrics and multivariate prioritized risk maps. The project team will identify the critical issues, challenges, and obstacles to designing resilience hubs in the study region of Calhoun County, Florida, and develop socioeconomic and demographic mathematical metrics to account for infrastructure characteristics, social factors, land use, and other localized conditions. The team will create vulnerability maps using Geographical Information Systems-based tools to identify high-need places in Calhoun County, which will be supported by the library-community outreach to educate residents about available services. Maps will also inform spatial optimization models for mobile emergency response library hub locations. This project’s findings, community engagement methods, and practice-based solutions may be scalable to other disaster-prone, rural regions. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program, Track B—Resilience to Natural Disasters—and is a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Homeland Security.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.