A nsf Regional Resilience Innovation Incubator (R2I2) project

Resilience Innovation Incubator for Cascadia Coastal Hazards

NSF Award # 2519682

This project addresses the urgent need for coastal communities in the Pacific Northwest to identify and implement a range of possible solutions to compounding hazards that are informed by local priorities and knowledge. By bringing together community members and professionals with researchers, this project endeavors to collaboratively develop and test a suite of innovative solutions aimed at reducing risk and building long-term coastal community resilience.

This incubator advances four types of solutions to coastal hazard risks:

nature-based solutions

solutions grounded in assessing community assets and adaptive capacity

community modeling solutions

multi-hazard planning and decision support tools

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The incubator also tests different ways of reducing coastal hazard risks to enhance the resilience of all communities across the region. By focusing on both acute and chronic hazards, and by engaging with a wide range of partners across disciplines and sectors, this project advances scientific knowledge while promoting health and welfare by enhancing community preparedness and resilience. The knowledge and approaches developed through this project will have the potential to be applied broadly, offering a model for addressing coastal hazards in regions across the United States and beyond.

To develop this approach, the project focuses on two Resilience Incubation Use Cases (RICs): Pilot studies co-designed and co-evaluated with diverse coastal partners, including Tribes, state agencies, nonprofits, and private sector collaborators.

RIC 1: Localized Flooding and Erosion Risk

Research Objective: Create a decision navigation platform that will help guide users to appropriate solutions while accounting for complexities.

The PNW EcoCoast Planner will be a web-based tool, asking users a series of questions to identify their values and concerns. The data will be matched with local regulatory constraints, high-resolution sea-level-rise projection data, and environmental conditions to develop a “menu” of customized adaptation solution spaces.

RIC 2: Hyper-Localized Landslide Risk

Research Objective: Develop and apply a regional-scale framework to estimate building-level landslide risk, expressing risk in financial losses and threat to life.

Current approaches to manage landslide risk rely on susceptibility maps showing where landslides might occur, without quantifying how often failures happen and how far debris might travel or what damage could result. Community partners across the PNW have expressed an urgent need for locally relevant hazards information to assess their risks and co-develop effective adaptation strategies.