SAI-R: Reducing Natural Hazards Risks by Incorporating Community Impacts and Equity

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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.Concrete buildings designed prior to the implementation of modern building codes in the mid-1970s may be highly vulnerable to collapse. Many thousands of these structures in seismically active areas like California are still in service. This includes residential buildings, schools, and critical facilities like hospitals. Although these vulnerabilities are known, local ordinances mandating retrofits have been largely unsuccessful in achieving risk reductions. Building codes governing seismic retrofits focus almost exclusively on structural vulnerability and preventing loss of life during an earthquake. They tend to ignore the value that people place on the functionality of buildings and the ability to reoccupy them as quickly as possible after an extreme event. This SAI research project identifies different stakeholders’ willingness to pay for seismic retrofits on various types of buildings. It also investigates the priorities and incentives that are necessary to successfully motivate action. The long-term aim of this research is to identify effective policy-making strategies to motivate communities to mitigate seismic risks before a future earthquake disaster strikes.This project uses several approaches to better capture the feedback between human interaction with the built environment and infrastructure vulnerability. One approach uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to elicit measures of building functionality and usage that can be used to predict how community members prioritize different retrofit options based on their cost, the buildings affected, and resulting performance in the event of a major earthquake. Another approach uses physical experiments and simulation of earthquakes on archetypal building features to better characterize the vulnerability of this type of concrete building and the effectiveness of different retrofit options. The data generated by these social and physical experiments are combined to produce a decision support system that policy makers can use to design retrofit and funding strategies that are closely aligned with the revealed preferences of the community. Incorporating stakeholder preferences into risk mitigation efforts will improve and strengthen resilience to future earthquake disasters.This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences and the Directorate for Engineering.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.