FOCUS AREAS
OUR FOCUS AREAS
By delving into six focus areas or “thrusts,” the Hub will provide data, models, and software tools to develop a computational framework that merges the many intertwined ideas and disciplinary perspectives involved in CHEER.
The specific tasks undertaken within the Hub are tightly integrated through the computational framework, making it difficult to disentangle them into independent projects. Nevertheless, for convenience, we organize the research into six thrusts.
Integration
The integration thrust merges the advancements in each of the other thrusts into a computational environment that can be used to explore the many questions at the intersection of hurricane loss, economy, and equity. Focuses on ensuring the modules interact properly, running the full framework, extracting the results, and soliciting and incorporating feedback and perspective from each of the other modules.
Hazards
The hazards thrust studies the effects of hurricanes and climate change, including strong winds, rain, and coastal and inland flooding, on coastal communities in our case study areas.
Buildings
The buildings thrust investigates changes in residential building stock over time as well as the damage and loss associated with their vulnerability to hazards.
Economy
The economy thrust explores how the economy affects households, equity, and the built environment. It simulates trajectories of economic activity in the three case study sites and their surrounding regions to study the consequences of hazards events on these economies.
Government
The government thrust focuses on decision making by each level of government, the consequences they experience, and interactions among them. Researchers explore the governments’ multiple competing goals and how officials think about equity – what they think it means, how they measure it, and how they change their decision-making processes or their decisions to make more equitable policies.
Households
The households thrust focuses on how renters and homeowners experience and are exposed to risks through normal processes of society and deliberate decision-making. Hub researchers also explore how households make decisions about insurance and home strengthening as well as their perspectives on financial and social costs of housing instability in post-disaster environments. This thrust works toward giving voices to historically underrepresented groups and renters.
