Title: Urban Resilience to Extreme Weather-related Events
Principal Investigator: Rinku Roy Chowdhury
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation

Urban areas are vulnerable to extreme weather-related events because of their location, high concentration of people, and increasingly complex and interdependent infrastructure. Recent disasters demonstrate not just failures in built infrastructure, but also the inadequacy of institutions, resources, and information systems to prepare for and respond to events of this magnitude. This interdisciplinary project will develop a diverse suite of new methods and tools to assess how infrastructure can be more resilient, provide ecosystem services, improve social well-being, and exploit new technologies in ways that benefit all segments of urban populations. The primary research questions are how do social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS) interact to generate vulnerability or resilience to extreme weather-related events, and how can urban SETS dynamics be guided along more resilient, equitable, and sustainable trajectories? Specifically, this project will analyze the spatial structure and land cover components of vulnerability to climate-driven extreme events in Miami and comparatively across other urban sites, and entails particular attention to spatially differentiated patterns of urban exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity in the face of extreme events such as hurricanes, floods and droughts.