SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: Rural Resiliency Hubs: A Planning Approach to Addressing the Resiliency Divide

公共图书馆为农村公民提供关键信息、服务和支持，以抵御逆境。许多地方、州和联邦机构将公共图书馆用作援助分发点、志愿者接待中心、庇护所和临时办公场所。虽然灾难复原力研究主要集中在城市环境中，但农村环境具有不同的、未被充分研究的特点。农村地区相当大的地理差异性也使自然灾害的后果中出现了明显的“韧性鸿沟”，比如2018年的S飓风迈克尔。因此，该项目的目标是在一个中心假设的指导下，研究和制定符合农村社区不同需求的应急计划：了解社区行为者、人口需求、环境、信息和基础设施之间的相互依存关系，促进农村社区应急行动的有效性，可以导致优化多方面灾害应对的成功战略和政策。为了解决复原力鸿沟，本项目将探索三个研究问题：(1)社区参与者、人口需求、环境、信息和基础设施之间的相互作用如何促进农村社区的灾难复原力？此外，农村利益相关者和居民如何看待这个系统中的公共图书馆？(2)如何衡量和模拟社区复原力中社会、空间、环境和基础设施因素之间的相互依存和相互联系，以揭示农村社区复原力的差异？(3)如何通过将农村图书馆作为自然灾害应对的复原力枢纽来弥合这种复原力鸿沟？此外，与在灾难恢复系统中推广图书馆有关的政策和基础设施问题是什么？这些问题将通过不同种类的数据收集和融合以及开发多网络复原力指标和多变量优先风险图来探索。该项目团队将确定在佛罗里达州卡尔霍恩县的研究区域设计弹性枢纽的关键问题、挑战和障碍，并开发社会经济和人口数学指标，以考虑基础设施特征、社会因素、土地使用和其他当地条件。该小组将使用基于地理信息系统的工具创建脆弱性地图，以确定卡尔霍恩县的高需求地点，这将得到图书馆-社区外联的支持，以教育居民有关可用的服务。地图还将为移动应急响应图书馆枢纽位置的空间优化模型提供信息。该项目的发现、社区参与方法和基于实践的解决方案可能会扩展到其他易受灾害影响的农村地区。该项目是对公民创新挑战计划的回应，B轨道-自然灾害的恢复力-是NSF和国土安全部的合作。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。

Public libraries provide rural citizens with critical information, services, and support to withstand adversity. Numerous local, state, and federal agencies use public libraries as aid distribution points, volunteer reception centers, shelters, and temporary office spaces. While disaster resilience research has focused primarily on urban settings, rural environments have different, understudied, characteristics. The considerable geographical variability in rural areas has also made the “resilience divide” apparent in natural disasters’ aftermath, such as 2018’s Hurricane Michael. As such, the goal of this project is to study and develop emergency plans that fit distinct needs of rural communities, guided by a central hypothesis: Understanding interdependencies among the community actors, population needs, environment, information, and infrastructure that foster emergency operations efficacy in rural communities can lead to the successful strategies and policies for optimizing multi-faceted disaster response. To address the resilience divide, this project will explore three research questions: (1) What interactions between community actors, population needs, environment, information, and infrastructure foster disaster resilience in rural communities? Additionally, how do rural stakeholders and residents view public libraries in this system? (2) How can the interdependency and interconnectivity between social, spatial, environmental, and infrastructural factors in community resilience be measured and modeled to reveal the divide in resilience for rural communities? (3) How can this resiliency divide be bridged by using rural libraries as resiliency hubs for natural disaster response? Additionally, what are the policy and infrastructural issues relating to promoting libraries in a disaster resilience system? The questions will be explored via heterogeneous data collection and fusion and by developing multi-network resilience metrics and multivariate prioritized risk maps. The project team will identify the critical issues, challenges, and obstacles to designing resilience hubs in the study region of Calhoun County, Florida, and develop socioeconomic and demographic mathematical metrics to account for infrastructure characteristics, social factors, land use, and other localized conditions. The team will create vulnerability maps using Geographical Information Systems-based tools to identify high-need places in Calhoun County, which will be supported by the library-community outreach to educate residents about available services. Maps will also inform spatial optimization models for mobile emergency response library hub locations. This project’s findings, community engagement methods, and practice-based solutions may be scalable to other disaster-prone, rural regions. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program, Track B—Resilience to Natural Disasters—and is a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Homeland Security.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.