SCC-CIVIC-FA Track B: Hoomalu Halelea - Community-led Innovation for Integrated Flood Resilience

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In this project, a team of academic and community partners will combine diverse methods and sources of knowledge of watershed changes over time to enhance community resilience to increasing threats of extreme flooding in coastal communities. Like other locales around the world, the project's site of Halelea, a rural district on Island of Kauai, Hawaii, is on the cusp of the climate crisis. In April 2018, an extreme rain event in Halelea set a new US 24-hr rainfall record (49.7”) and caused $19.7M in losses due to flooding. Since then, flooding and landslides have reoccurred frequently. Traditional knowledge and oversight of water resources, built across generations, is no longer sufficient due to changes in rainfall, species invasion, and land use change. In collaboration with community members, nonprofits who have led flood and disaster response, and the Kauai Emergency Management Agency, this project will enhance resilience to increasing flood risk in coastal communities by strengthening connections of community members with one another and their environment, as well as with local government, tourists, and newer residents. Additionally, the team is distilling best practices in developing an inclusive, community-based environmental management approach for coastal areas and participating in on-going knowledge sharing with coastal communities including the Pacific Islands and the continental US.The vision of this project is to enhance social and ecological community resilience to increasing flood risk by linking Indigenous knowledge, local observations of ecological change, and data from scientific instrumentation. This approach will improve capacity for mountain-to-sea watershed management, while connecting future generations to their responsibilities for reciprocal care. The work addresses the following specific project goals: (1) Collaborative Research: Work with community members to integrate diverse methods and sources of knowledge of watershed changes over time to enhance local level care and management of streams; (2) Restoration: Enhance effectiveness of stream clearing and restoration efforts; (3) Monitoring and Communication: Improve availability of historical and real-time hydrometeorological data to enhance understanding of flood hazards, and promote use of social media to improve community connectedness before, during, and after extreme events; and (4) Community Education and Training: Provide classes and educational material, in community-identified topics, to enhance holistic resilience to future climate-change induced disasters. This project is part of the Civic Innovation Challenge, a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Energy's Vehicle Technology Office, and the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate and Federal Emergency Management Agency.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.