EAGER: SAI: Community Perceptions of Flood Mitigation Strategies

加强美国基础设施(SAI)是一项NSF计划，旨在刺激以人类为中心的基础性研究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的生活质量改善提供了坚实的基础。强大、可靠和有效的基础设施刺激私营部门创新，增长经济，创造就业机会，提高公共部门服务提供效率，加强社区力量，促进机会均等，保护自然环境，增强国家安全，推动美国的领导地位。要实现这些目标，需要来自科学和工程学科的专业知识。SAI侧重于人类推理和决策、治理以及社会和文化过程的知识如何能够建立和维护有效的基础设施，以改善生活和社会，并建立在技术和工程进步的基础上。科学研究表明，在自然灾害方面，处境不利的社区遭受的伤害不成比例。这些社区通常会经历更极端的自然灾害影响和更长的恢复期。针对这些问题提出的解决方案往往充满困难，包括有限的预算、对当地行业的吸引力，甚至来自当地社区的阻力。这项研究的目标是更好地了解社区如何理解其自身的自然灾害风险，以及为改善这些灾害的后果而提出的解决方案。具体地说，该项目侧重于洪水风险，并在经常发生灾难性洪水事件的地区提出了洪水缓解战略。洪灾缓解战略往往存在争议，因为许多围绕洪灾缓解努力的建议都暗示着一系列“赢家”和“输家”，即一个地区的洪灾缓解可能意味着另一个地区洪灾风险的增加。这些战略还可能意味着在洪水易发地区的重建过程中失去房屋或企业。此外，公众理解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，无论是在长期规划中，还是在制定应急协议时，在规划洪灾缓解战略时，都需要社区的意见和更好地了解社区的意见。该项目有助于更好地了解社区对洪灾缓解战略的看法如何能够更好地为当地政策和洪灾缓解工作的实施提供信息。为更广泛地研究社会脆弱性和灾害问题做出了科学贡献。重要的是，这项研究确定了基础设施的感知和功能之间存在的差距，这可能会导致未来在面对自然灾害时具有更强的韧性。现有的研究考察了社会对气候灾害的脆弱性，表明贫困和少数群体社区更容易受到此类事件的负面影响。然而，很少有研究试图理解灾害的客观风险如何与对风险的认知有关，以及社区如何理解公共缓解战略。本项目结合这些视角来研究社区对风险和缓解的看法如何与物理基础设施、自然环境以及提出的缓解风险的计划相关联。具体地说，该项目研究了这些认知与德克萨斯州休斯敦的洪水风险和洪水缓解基础设施之间的关系。这项研究涉及收集休斯顿地区居民的调查数据，这些数据与他们对洪水风险的看法和对拟议的洪水缓解策略的意见有关。这些认知被叠加在环境质量和基础设施的客观指标收集的数据上，以帮助确定公众感知与已建成环境的功能之间可能存在的不匹配，这将导致未来更强大的基础设施。该项目的主要目标是提供可操作的研究，以改进减灾战略。通过纳入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方式减轻灾害的努力，使社区参与进来。最直接的是，这项工作为地方和国家减轻持续洪水事件的破坏提供了信息，并可能成为如何更好地理解和结合社区对洪水风险和缓解战略的理解的典范。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.