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

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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.