CIVIC-FA Track B: Creating the West Virginia Flood Resilience Framework for comprehensive disaster response and long-term community recovery

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Community resilience is the ability of communities to withstand and mitigate the stress of a disaster. It is a key component of long-term recovery from natural disasters such as floods. Community resilience requires up-to-date knowledge of disaster risk and effective pre-disaster planning and coordination of the complex network of actors involved in disaster response. Every county in West Virginia has a high risk of flooding and these risks are compounded by increasing frequency and intensity of precipitation, aging infrastructure, and high levels of socioeconomic vulnerability. This project is a collaboration between civic actors from non-profit organizations and state agencies in West Virginia that play key roles in disaster preparation, response, and recovery and university researchers with social science, legal, and geographic information science (GIS) expertise. The science team also has extensive experience working with flood-prone West Virginia communities. The result of research products developed in this collaboration will be the West Virginia Flood Resilience Framework. A freely available online resource containing materials co-created by the project team, various stakeholders, and the end users. This framework will support residents, local leaders, non-profits, and state officials in efforts to increase flood resilience for West Virginia communities. It will improve knowledge about flood risk, floodplain management, and comprehensive disaster preparation. The online tool and its capabilities are designed to provide a transferable model for creation of locally tailored disaster response plans with broad application to flood-prone communities across Appalachia and the United States.The CIVIC Innovation Challenge is a collaboration with Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Science Foundation. The objectives of this project are to: (1) Use a state-wide survey to assess how well West Virginia residents have recovered from past floods and how prepared they are for future floods; (2) Create flood risk indicator reports for all 286 floodplain communities in West Virginia; (3) Develop in-depth flood risk visualization tools for selected disadvantaged communities using Participatory GIS methods; (4) Conduct in-person and virtual trainings about floodplain management and flood insurance; (5) Host the Statewide Flood Resilience Symposium and create the Best Practices Guide for Pre-disaster Coordination of Flood Resilience in West Virginia; and (6) Build and launch the an online utility that contains all project outputs in one accessible tool. As a result of this innovative integration of quantitative, qualitative, and Participatory GIS methods, the project results in a novel approach to creating flood risk visualizations that better aligns expert knowledge with community needs than traditional GIS and other approaches. It also provides a publicly accessible framework and resource hub to increase community flood resilience, as well as delivers a transferable model for community-engaged research that centers co-production of knowledge with insights for scholarship on building resilience to natural disaster in vulnerable communities.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.