Natural disasters present a host of problems to the communities that experience them. Add a rural location to the mix, and it can create even more difficulties in both the anticipation and recovery efforts. CCHRIC—Confronting Coastal Hazards for Rural and Indigenous Communities—seeks to help in this exactly area. Their team will use a three-prong approach to transform scientific insights and local knowledge into actionable solutions and employs a co-production method to bridge the gap between advanced climate science and the immediate needs of local communities for resilience against coastal hazards, to both further scientific understanding of regional Earth's systems and to support solutions to natural hazard-related problems.
As of the 2020 Census, there are 301,609 residents in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This area faces aging infrastructure, lead to particular vulnerabilities in remote, rural, and Indigenous communities. This project targets a region that features underserved rural communities and Tribal Nations and is distinguished by a variety of climate-related threats and limited community resilience. Team efforts are organized into three research themes to assist in science translation and community engagement, including:
- Understanding how climate change-induced feedback mechanisms among regional Earth system components contribute to changes in regional climate, particularly in lake effect snowstorms and the summer convective storms from the global warming perspective by applying local high-resolution climate simulations for historical and future periods using a fully coupled atmosphere-land lake model developed by our team;
- Translating future climate change and extremes into flood and landslide, extreme heat, and wildfire risks at local community to county scales using a set of hazard modeling and analysis and incorporating these results into an existing open-access toolkit, Rural Hazard Resilience Tools (RHRT), for risk assessment and visualization;
- Developing a community-focused co-production approach in close collaboration with local governments and communities to identify the barriers and challenges rural communities face in adapting to and mitigating the effects of climate change and to develop effective strategies for hazard resilience.
Intellectual Merit
The knowledge and insights from this project will help develop a suite of tools for the community to assess all significant climate-related risks, particularly in a warming climate. The results of this study will expand the boundaries of traditional disaster preparedness and resilience to climate-related hazards by leveraging the expertise and backgrounds of the investigators operating at the intersection of various disciplines, including climate science, geological and water resources engineering, social science, geoinformatics, and cloud computing.
The proposed approach reflects a deep understanding of interactions between large-scale
climate dynamics and local atmosphere-land-lake processes and the complexities involved
in the feedback mechanisms between climate and lake systems in the context of natural
hazard risk assessment. These advancements will equip communities with greater preparedness
and resilience to climate-related natural disasters. The advancements made through
this project will empower communities with enhanced preparedness and resilience to
climate-related natural disasters. This will help them anticipate these events better
and effectively respond and recover from them, thereby reducing their overall impact.
This project, therefore, represents a significant step
forward in our collective efforts to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate
change in the Great Lakes region.
Broader Impacts
Communities across the Great Lakes region face significant challenges due to climate-related natural hazards. This region, home to many rural and Indigenous communities, suffers from a noticeable lack of data and tools to understand the risks associated with climate extremes and geohazards. The proposed project aims to address these issues by investigating the changing nature and patterns of climate extremes influenced by the Great Lakes and their impact on climate-related geohazards.
Additionally, the project seeks to develop community-oriented tools to enhance disaster resilience and climate change adaptation among underserved populations. Although this project's primary focus is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the tools, resources, datasets, and analysis frameworks developed could be scaled and utilized by other communities across the Great Lakes region, including those in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This potential for scalability ensures that the project's outcomes can contribute to disaster resilience planning on a broader regional scale. The project will foster academia-community relationships, which could catalyze increased engagement between universities and local communities. These relationships will facilitate identifying future needs and co-creating solutions, ensuring that the project remains relevant and impactful.