'SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: Co-creating Data for Disaster Resilience with Historically Marginalized Communities in Savannah.'

In coastal communities across the United States, environmental disasters such as flooding, hurricanes, and heatwaves have become increasingly common and costly, both in terms of human and economic impacts. The coronavirus pandemic is exacerbating these impacts and bringing inequalities to the fore. This project proposes to study the compounded effects of social and physical vulnerabilities to environmental disasters in Savannah, Georgia, as well as the local policies and practices that promote resilience and recovery. The proposed approach prioritizes social equity and justice by including residents and representatives of Hudson Hill, a lower-income black neighborhood in Savannah, as research partners. Together, the project will identify and co-create new sources of data on disaster vulnerability and resilience and foster broader stakeholder networks within the region. The team also includes researchers from Georgia Tech and Savannah State as well as officials from the City of Savannah Office of Sustainability and the Harambee House, an environmental justice organization.

New forms of community-based data exploration, integration, and mapping are necessary to understand the impacts of compounded environmental disasters faced by residents of Savannah, Georgia, particularly marginalized communities. The project will use these new tools to identify what vulnerability and resilience mean in this context, and then reimagine the resilience networks that these communities need to bounce forward from future disasters. The plan of work includes: 1) socially distanced workshops with communities and organizations; 2) preliminary data collection and archival research on resilience and vulnerability in the area; 3) the development of community-level research protections that bring social justice to data stewardship; 4) the of design community-centered but socially distanced data exploration and mapping techniques; and 5) collaborative grant-writing for the full project proposal. The intellectual merit of the project is to improve our understanding of disaster resilience in marginalized coastal communities and to establish new community-centered methods of data exploration and mapping that prioritize data justice. The following broader impacts are anticipated: 1) to highlight and strengthen existing strategies of disaster resilience in marginalized coastal communities; 2) to model how university partnerships might prioritize social equity and justice as they co-create data and put them into action; 3) to chart and establish a resilience network that can leverage data as planning tools for collective recovery and regeneration; and 4) to model new forms of inclusive and equitable community engaged research under social distancing conditions of COVID-19.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.