PROJECTS

Building Resilient Communities

Direct Technical Assistance

Building Community Resilience Through a Nation-Wide University Network and International Learning Laboratory

This project will develop and institutionalize an International Learning Laboratory, focusing on the identification of best practices advancing hazard mitigation grants management and planning activities.
Pam Rubinoff, right, and Dr. Austin Becker, second from right, instruct participants in a June training on preparation for “Hurricane Rhody.” Photo via the University of Rhode Island.

Coastal Hazards Analysis, Modeling, and Prediction System for Emergency Planning, Management, and Response

This project resolves a critical information blind-spot, i.e. local level short-term hazard forecasts, and thereby enables emergency and facility managers to pinpoint vulnerabilities and take actions to mitigate them in the days and hours before a severe storm or tropical storm strikes.
Storm footage

Community-Level Decision-Making for Coastal Mitigation

Adoption of The 500-Year Design Flood. We will analyze the impact of coastal flooding for the communities of Lumberton, NC, and Fort Myers Beach, FL, both of which have been impacted by hurricane floods. 
Mitigation Funding-8000 mitigations have been geolocated

Evaluating Coastal Adaptation Strategies in the Face of Chronic and Extreme Events

This project evaluates the effectiveness of coastal adaptation strategies at reducing chronic and extreme flood risk in the face of sea level rise.
HI Flooding

Identifying Obstacles to Flood Mitigation Funding

This project combines two novel datasets to analyze the full pipeline from flooded to funded.
Housing-and-Local-Needs

Landscape Study of Data Needs and its Access and Availability to Support Community Resilience

Our research aims to provide insight into transforming the disaster risk management community so that effectiveness is an embedded practice that encapsulates all needs, including the needs of the most historically impacted.
Listening to the Academic and Community Experts on Preparedness for Natural Hazards

Listening to the Academic and Community Experts on Preparedness for Natural Hazards

Our research aims to provide insight into how NGOs and government officials support historically impacted communities through a hazard.
Norfolk greenspace design

Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard

The Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ (PIRS) assists local practitioners to assess the degree to which networks of local plans target geographic areas most prone to hazards and spatially evaluate the coordination of local plans.
Road flooding in Kitty Hawk, NC during Hurricane Sandy. © Peggy Birkemeier

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Household Strengthening and Insurance Decisions

This interdisciplinary project improved a developing tool to help agencies explore the potential effects of policies related to household hurricane risk reduction.
Urban Search and Rescue Teams from Missouri Task Force 1 look for residents that may be stranded in a neighborhood that was flooded following Hurricane Matthew. A brick church is pictured here with water reaching its doors.

Buyouts, elevating, and floodproofing

In this project we propose to model two communities, one inland and one coastal, with a suite of flood scenarios.
The Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change has five stages, divided into Pre-Action and Action elements.

Communicating Risks to Motivate Individual Action

This project applies the Transtheoretical Model (TTM), a widely used behavior change model developed at the University of Rhode Island and applied successfully to over 40 health risk behaviors.
An earlier version of COMSURE mapped critical infrastructure locations in CLARC, an artificial community used to test models. Image from Dr. Al Wallace.

Community Supply Resiliency (COMSURE)

The resilience of a coastal community to an extreme event depends upon the resilience of its critical infrastructures, one of which is the system of supply chains that provide the goods and services that make a community livable – Community Supply Resiliency.
High floodwaters. Photo courtesy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Flood Apex Program

The CRC partners with the Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) on a program that aims to save lives, reduce property loss and enhance resilience to disruptive flood events.
Students and faculty from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill North Carolina State University worked with residents on designs for a potential expansion of the town in August 2017.

Hurricane Matthew Disaster Recovery and Resilience Initiative (HMDRRI)

HMDRRI involves the university engagement of faculty and students as well as professional planning experts in addressing community and state-level needs associated with recovery from Hurricane Matthew.
Volunteers Work on Boardwalk in Asbury Park

Implementing the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool

The Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool is a web-based tool that enables end users (e.g., planners, emergency managers, long-term recovery committees) to track the progress and quality of post-disaster recovery by comparing baseline and post-disaster data.
Mangrove tree scanning

Integrating ADCIRC™ Prediction System Tools to Support HAZUS Damage Assessments and Planning Efforts for More Resilient Communities

We will build on previous research integrating ADCIRC Prediction System results with Hazus flood exposure and damage modeling techniques to evaluate the impact of natural hazards to improve planning.
Joint Port Resilience Assessment Project

Joint Port Resilience Assessment Project

This project was established to develop a Port Resilience Assessment and Decision Guide to provide a holistic understanding of port operations, the infrastructure systems that support these operations, and analysis methods that can be utilized to understand functional resilience and support investment and other decisions.
Operationalizing the Coastal Hazards Overlay District and Hazard Transect

Operationalizing the Coastal Hazards Overlay District and Hazard Transect

The Coastal Hazards Overlay District Guide will provide actionable information to communities as they seek to reduce natural hazards risk and adapt to a changing climate by providing the tools needed to apply a series of risk reduction measures in coastal communities that are already located in vulnerable locations.
Policy simulations include visualization of commercial port properties impacted by potential sea-level rise. Illustration by Dr. Peter Stempel and Dr. Austin Becker.

Overcoming Barriers to Motivate Community Action to Enhance Resilience

This project is designed to improve our understanding of how to overcome the “adaptation deficit” within the context of community preparedness for coastal storm hazards.