Select Research Projects

Scalable Watershed Resilience

To further the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC)’s ongoing efforts surrounding resilience of critical infrastructure systems, the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems (IRIS) at the University of Georgia (UGA) proposes to support the co-development of a top-down regional critical infrastructure resilience framework for the Savannah River Basin by leveraging theory and practice through collaboration with academia, government, private sector, and community members. The project team is a cohesive group of faculty, extension staff, and students that include partners with great technical capacities as well as community engagement and planning knowledge and experience all of whom are invested in the success of this effort by valuing collaboration over competition, transdisciplinary work over silos, and solving problems over occupying problems, and who have a demonstrable history of successful collaborations across disciplines and involving real-world partners and applications. In order to co-develop the resilience framework with stakeholders, the research team will create a participatory setting including alignment meetings, research charrettes, and subject matter expert interviews. We will use Augusta, GA as a case study site, but provide guidance on scaling the framework throughout the Savannah River Basin. Establishing a regional critical infrastructure resilience framework for the Savannah River Basin will provide significant public benefits by:

• planning for known and unknown risks in a complex environment,
• identifying the resilience capacity of the community to manage said risks, and
• providing explicit guidance on how to deploy the framework in surrounding communities, improving regional resilience.

Ultimately, this will help communities allocate limited resources toward improving critical infrastructure resilience in a systematic manner, and, thereby, improving resilience before, during, and after disturbance events.

This project is funded by USACE.

Enabling Adaptation Governance in Puerto Rico

Our work responds to international calls for adaptation decision-making to better account for the social and institutional relations that shape adaptation interventions and climate services. To enhance equity and effectiveness of urban flood risk adaptation decision-making, our innovative approach aims to make the intersecting agendas of disparate agencies operating at distinct spatial and temporal scales visible to flood-affected communities, and, concurrently, to make the needs and values of local communities accessible to agencies responsible for adaptation interventions.

The primary objectives of this research are to:

• develop a networked governance assessment framework that maps and reveals the different desired adaptation pathways, plans, and actor network characteristics (e.g., roles and responsibilities, agendas and motivations, mental models, and knowledge systems),
• apply a transformative co-production process to engage local communities and stakeholders to identify the multi-scale and cross-sector barriers and enablers of adaptation, and facilitate the identification of capacities and solutions to overcome those barriers, navigate governance complexity, and enable collaboration and partnerships,
• develop visualization tools to turn the framework into a useful, accessible, and replicable approach to Social-Ecological-Technical Systems (SETS) adaptation planning.

This project is funded by NOAA.