USACE/ERDC Grant for Enhancing Scalable Water Resilience in Underserved Communities

Disclosures of current and pending support made in this application may render an applicant ineligible for funding. Prior to award and throughout the period of performance, ERDC may continue to request updated continuing and pending support information, which will be reviewed and may result in discontinuation of funding.

Religious organizations are entitled to compete on equal footing with secular organizations for Federal financial assistance as described in E.O. 13798, “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty.”

THIS IS A 2 PHASE APPROACH. 

SOI DUE: 07 August 2023.

FULL PROPOSAL DUE: 23 August 2023

Resilience, broadly, is how effectively and efficiently a system mitigates and subsequently recovers from disruption. Improving community resiliency in the face of environmental, natural, economic, and social disruptions is proving to be paramount to achieving long-term stability for the US.

USACE/ERDC has been working on developing methods and tools for resilience quantification in complex systems, including watershed resilience, for the Public good. Recent framework for resilience implementation (e.g., CISA’s Infrastructure Resilience Planning Framework (IRPF), OSTP’s Grand Resilience Pathways, other national and international resilience – related tools need to be adjusted to communities in the Southeast Region who experience emergencies from flooding and coastal storm damage. This work builds upon projects that have been initiated in the Southeast Region; however, the focus here is on building resilience for low-capacity communities. Communities that have historically been underserved (low-capacity) fail to receive the necessary aid, despite often standing to benefit the most from resiliency-oriented community projects. Compared to well-resourced communities (high-capacity), low-capacity communities do not have the financial resources or personnel capital to spend on highly competitive proposals. The entrenched “top-down” funding model neglects low-capacity communities and manifests three major barriers preventing adequate risk mitigation and resiliency building: 1) program requirements that impede access and benefits, 2) limited investment in local and regional technical assistance, and 3) obstacles to developing collaborative projects and partnerships.

The objective of this program is to review resilience quantification methodology and processes of community engagement. Reconciling community needs and methodological gaps should result in methodological advancement.  Extension from individual projects acting on specific communities to watershed and regional approaches is required. This work would focus on amplification from specific threat scenarios acting on individual vulnerabilities of specific communities toward multiple compounding threats acting at watershed-wide scale.

Objective 1: Contribute to a stakeholder-driven Resilience Assessment for the Savannah River Basin. This objective prioritizes initial research activities that are focused on the collection of existing data on critical functions to identify interdependencies and vulnerabilities. Activities associated with Objective 1 will include the following: (i) identification of all critical functions in the Savannah River Basin; (ii) a review of the literature to define metrics for each critical function in the Basin; and (iii) a comprehensive list of critical functions metrics with definitions. The assessment will build upon existing ERDC published work in resilience with focus on the Resilience Matrix, an organizing framework on four phases of resilience (prepare, absorb, recover, adapt) against four domains of resilience (physical, information, cognitive, social).

Objective 2: Support the development of top-down resilience planning. This objective will connect community-driven initiatives and tools with top-down approaches for watershed management for the Public. There is a need to integrate community objectives into management strategies for assets in the watershed. Critical functions supplied by the watershed provide mission assurance for projects in the basin. Limited resources to operate and maintain projects through events with high uncertainty requests tools and methods for optimization and tradeoffs evaluation. This activity will produce deliverables for methods and tools to prioritize decisions in the watershed to enhance resilience.