In less than a decade, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, Florence, Michael, Laura, Ida, and Ian have each cost the U.S. more than $25 billion in damages, destroying homes and businesses, and upending life in hundreds of communities. The devastation repeats over and over. 

The current system for managing natural disaster risk in the U.S. has evolved over time but is still widely acknowledged to be problematic, insufficient, and short-sighted. Community resilience to hurricane wind and flood damage remains challenging to achieve in practice, especially when also considering the additional goal of economic prosperity and the context of changing coastal conditions. This is where the Hub comes in.

The CHEER Hub aims to provide a new approach to managing hurricane risk by helping develop policies and programs that will be effective over the long term and that are likely to actually be implemented. Long-term effectiveness requires considering population growth, changing coastal conditions, and the resilience of all affected households up front. Implementability means aligning policies with the way different stakeholders naturally make decisions rather than deciding what is best for the community and then trying to convince them to behave as we want them to. It means offering win-win outcomes in which all stakeholders are better off, and addressing multiple objectives, including economic prosperity, as part of the policy design. 

In particular, the Hub represents these ideas in a mathematical modeling framework to quantitatively explore their complex interactions. The Hub focuses on households and housing, which play critical roles in economic prosperity and resilience. We are applying lessons from and contributing to the scholarship of convergent research.