EAGER: SAI: Community Perceptions of Flood Mitigation Strategies

EAGER：SAI：社区对防洪策略的看法

• 批准号: 2121931
• 负责人: Kathryn Anderson
• 金额: $ 29.95万
• 依托单位: University of Houston
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-09-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2121931&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; SAI; Community; Perceptions; Flood

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.Scientific research has shown that disadvantaged communities suffer disproportionately when it comes to natural disasters. These neighborhoods typically experience more extreme effects from natural disasters and longer recovery periods. Proposed solutions to these problems are often fraught with difficulties, including limited budgets, appeals to local industry, and even resistance from the local community. The goal of this research is to better understand how communities make sense of their own risk to natural disasters and the solutions that have been proposed to improve outcomes in these disasters. Specifically, this project focuses on flood risk and proposed flood mitigation strategies in areas frequently experiencing catastrophic flood events. Flood mitigation strategies are often contentious as many of the proposals surrounding flood mitigation efforts imply a set of “winners” and “losers,” whereby flood mitigation in one area may imply an increased risk of flooding in another area. These strategies may also imply a loss of homes or businesses in the process of redevelopment in flood-prone areas. Moreover, oftentimes the ways in which the public makes sense of their risk differs from the perspectives of local planners and engineers. This points to the need for community input and a better understanding of community opinions when planning flood mitigation strategies, both in long-term planning, as well as emergency protocols. This project provides a better understanding of how community perceptions of flood mitigation strategies could better inform local policy and implementation of flood mitigation efforts. It also makes a scientific contribution to the research on social vulnerability and disaster broadly. Importantly, this research identifies the gap that exists between perception and function of infrastructure, which may lead to stronger future resilience in the face of natural disaster.Extant research has examined social vulnerability to climate disasters, demonstrating that poor and minority communities have greater exposure to the negative effects of such events. However, little research has attempted to understand how objective risk of disaster relates to perceptions of risk and how communities make sense of public mitigation strategies. This project combines these perspectives to examine how neighborhood perceptions of risk and mitigation relate to the physical infrastructure, the natural environment, and proposed plans to mitigate risk. Specifically, the project examines how these perceptions relate to flood risk and the flood mitigation infrastructure in Houston, Texas. The research involves collection of survey data on residents of the Houston area related to their perceptions of flood risk and opinions on proposed flood mitigation strategies. These perceptions are overlayed onto data collected on objective indicators of environmental quality and infrastructure to help identify where there may be a mismatch between public perception and the function of built environments, which will lead to stronger future infrastructure. The primary goal of this project is to provide actionable research that will improve disaster mitigation strategies. By incorporating both human understandings of risk, as well as engineering perspectives on proposed solutions, this research advances efforts to mitigate disasters in an equitable manner that engages the community. Most immediately, this work informs local and national efforts to mitigate the devastation of persistent flood events and may serve as a model for how to better understand and contextualize community understandings of flood risk and mitigation strategies.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.

加强美国基础设施（SAI）是NSF的一项计划，旨在促进以人为本的基础和潜在的变革性研究，以加强美国的基础设施。有效的基础设施为社会经济活力和广泛改善生活质量奠定了坚实的基础。强大、可靠和有效的基础设施刺激私营部门创新，促进经济增长，创造就业机会，提高公共部门服务提供的效率，加强社区建设，促进机会平等，保护自然环境，增强国家安全，并推动美国的领导地位。为了实现这些目标，需要来自科学和工程学科的专业知识。SAI专注于人类推理和决策，治理以及社会和文化过程的知识如何使建设和维护有效的基础设施，改善生活和社会，并建立在技术和工程的进步。科学研究表明，当涉及到自然灾害时，弱势群体遭受不成比例的损失。 这些社区通常会受到自然灾害的极端影响，恢复期较长。 这些问题的拟议解决方案往往困难重重，包括预算有限，对当地工业的呼吁，甚至来自当地社区的抵制。 这项研究的目标是更好地了解社区如何理解自己对自然灾害的风险，以及为改善这些灾害的结果而提出的解决方案。 具体而言，该项目的重点是洪水风险，并提出了在经常发生灾难性洪水事件的地区的防洪减灾战略。防洪减灾战略往往是有争议的，因为许多关于防洪减灾工作的建议都意味着一系列的“赢家”和“输家”，其中一个地区的防洪减灾可能意味着另一个地区的洪水风险增加。这些策略还可能意味着在洪水易发地区的重建过程中会失去房屋或企业。 此外，公众理解其风险的方式往往与当地规划者和工程师的观点不同。这表明，在规划防洪战略时，无论是在长期规划中，还是在应急议定书中，都需要社区的投入和更好地了解社区的意见。该项目提供了一个更好地了解如何减轻洪水的战略社区的看法可以更好地为当地的政策和减轻洪水的努力的实施。它也为社会脆弱性和灾害的广泛研究做出了科学贡献。 重要的是，这项研究确定了基础设施的认知和功能之间存在的差距，这可能导致未来面对自然灾害时更强的复原力，现有的研究已经审查了社会对气候灾害的脆弱性，表明贫困和少数民族社区更容易受到此类事件的负面影响。 然而，很少有研究试图了解灾害的客观风险如何与风险的看法有关，以及社区如何理解公共减灾战略。 该项目结合这些观点来研究社区对风险和缓解的看法如何与物理基础设施，自然环境和拟议的风险缓解计划相关。 具体而言，该项目研究这些看法如何与洪水风险和洪水缓解基础设施在得克萨斯州休斯敦。 这项研究涉及收集调查数据的居民休斯顿地区有关他们的看法，洪水风险和意见，建议防洪减灾战略。 这些看法与收集的关于环境质量和基础设施的客观指标的数据相叠加，以帮助确定公众看法与建成环境功能之间可能存在的不匹配之处，这将导致未来基础设施的加强。该项目的主要目标是提供可操作的研究，以改进减灾战略。 通过结合人类对风险的理解，以及对拟议解决方案的工程观点，这项研究推动了以公平的方式减轻灾害的努力，使社区参与其中。 最直接的是，这项工作通知地方和国家的努力，以减轻持续的洪水事件的破坏，并可能作为一个模型，如何更好地理解和情境化社区的理解洪水风险和减灾战略。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。