2000 — 2003 |
Palumbi, Stephen Desalle, Robert Brumbaugh, Daniel (co-PI) [⬀] Broad, Kenneth Dahlgren, Craig |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Biocomplexity--Incubation Activity: Development of An Integrated Research Plan For Analyzing the Viability of a Marine Reserve Network @ American Museum Natural History
A series of three workshops will be held and are designed to develop an interdisciplinary study of the viability of coral reef ecosystems under strong anthropogenic stress. Using the establishment of a new marine reserve network in the Bahamas as a case study, an attempt will be made to determine which specific reserve implementations and additional zoning policies are most important for maintaining ecosystem function across the network. In doing so, the study of oceanographic and biological processes will be the basis for setting contextual limits, and investigation of resource use by humans will be used to model management options. Participants from such disciplines as statistics, oceanographic modeling, population genetics, marine ecology, theoretical population biology, anthropology, and economics will be brought together tol analyze ways to integrate theoretical and empirical information across important spatial and temporal scales. Based on the results of the workshops, a complete report of discussions will be created and distributed and educational materials (especially for Bahamian teachers and U.S. graduate students) will be developed.
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0.904 |
2001 — 2003 |
Podesta, Guillermo Letson, David Broad, Kenneth |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Be/Cnh: Climate Information and Forecasts in Agricultural Production Systems of the Argentine Pampas: Planning For Their Effective Use in Decision Making @ University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine&Atmospheric Sci
Agricultural production is a complex natural-human system that involves multiple value-laden objectives and various sources of risk. One of the major risk sources to agriculture is climate variability. In many parts of the world, the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon is the major single source of climate variability on seasonal-to-interannual scales. Links between ENSO-related climate variability and agricultural production have been established for many regions, including the Pampas of Argentina, a major production region and the geographic focus of the proposed effort. Recent scientific and technological advances have made it possible to forecast, with moderate skill, ENSO events with a lead time of months. In the agricultural sector, ENSO-related climate forecasts may help to reduce risks of adverse conditions or to take advantage of favorable conditions. Simply documenting the effects of climate variability and providing better climate forecasts is not sufficient to derive benefits from the emerging predictive capability, however. The factors that make many farmers reluctant to respond to climate information requires scientific attention in order to derive significant benefits from to the climate predictions. This collaborative project between U.S. and Argentine researchers seeks to enhance understandings of the use of probabilistic climate information to support decision making in agricultural production systems; to anticipate and possibly prevent unintended negative societal consequences of climate prediction, and to inform the design of a future operational system to disseminate climate information relevant and useful to decision and policy making in agriculture. The project will involve planning workshops and preliminary research to inform the planning effort. Two planning workshops will help to frame the problems to be addressed during the planning process, identify major research needs, and design a detailed plan for future work. Major issues to be addressed during planning workshops include the major sources of uncertainty in each component of the modeling approach and the identification and explication of the assumptions and limitations associated with all models that are used. Preliminary research activities to be undertaken include individual interviews and focus groups with farmers and technical advisors in the Argentine Pampas. The preliminary work also will include a survey of institutions that produce and disseminate climate information or agricultural advice and a description of existing decision-support tools that could be adapted to include climate forecast information.
This end-to-end exploration of components of a system for the use of climate information and forecasts in agriculture and other sectors will help assemble an effective multidisciplinary team of researchers drawn from the natural and social sciences. This project should foster greater knowledge about the ways through which newly available climate information can influence the complex interactions among human and natural systems like agricultural production in the Argentine Pampas may respond to the. The project should also help to lay the foundation for future work on the constraints and incentives for the effective use of climate information in benefit of society. This project is an award emanating from the FY 2001 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.
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1 |
2004 — 2012 |
Balstad, Roberta Krantz, David [⬀] Weber, Elke (co-PI) [⬀] Broad, Kenneth |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Dmuu: Individual and Group Decision Making Under Climate Uncertainty
The Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University will coordinate a series of studies of decision processes underlying human adaptation to uncertainty and change-in particular climate-related uncertainty and climate change. The Center's mission is to address decisions made at multiple scales: by individuals, by small groups, and by organizations that face climate-related problems. Center research will be conducted by Columbia students and faculty affiliated with the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) and with various units of the Earth Institute (EI), a consortium of natural and social scientists and engineers committed to improving our understanding of the Earth, its environment and climate, as well as by students and faculty at six partner institutions (Bard College, University of California at Davis, University of Georgia, University of Miami, University of Pittsburgh, and University of Oregon). CRED research will (a) extend insights about the constructive nature of individual decision making to the context of group decisions, (b) integrate social motives more fully into theories of decision making, and (c) study individual and group processes in the laboratory and in field settings as climate-change and climate-variability related decisions occur. A carefully designed set of four laboratory projects, four historical and theoretical projects, and eight field projects around the world will provide interdisciplinary and complementary insights on five substantive objectives: (1) understanding the nature and impact of mental representations and framing in both individual and group climate decision settings; (2) understanding the role in decision making of affective, experiential information vs. analytic, statistical information; (3) understanding the effects of individual and group goals, group composition, and group processes in climate decisions; (4) improving the presentation format and delivery of probabilistic climate information; (5) developing microeconomic theories that incorporate knowledge gained about individual and group decision processes making and macroeconomic theories that integrate climate models and their impacts. Five field projects examine the use of seasonal climate forecasts in individual, group, and institutional decision processes. Three field projects deal with long-term climate change and examine the role of direct personal experience vs. statistical information in detecting and responding to climate change.
CRED's research contributions are only the first of four areas of contribution. Research results will feed directly into the design and testing of educational interventions, decision tools, and institutional strategies that will help people, organizations, and governments to better understand the risks and possible benefits associated with climate change and variability and the response options they have. Regarding education and training, the Center will work with several educational programs under the aegis of the Earth Institute at Columbia, Columbia's Teachers College, local New York colleges and high schools, and the Office of Minority Affairs in the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The Center's curriculum and decision tools development will utilize the expertise of Columbia's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). The large and dense contact network of the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRI) will facilitate dissemination of these products. In addition, the Center will work with the Weather Channel to produce educational segments on climate change and climate variability that will allow for audience feedback. This award was supported as part of the Fiscal Year 2003 Human and Social Dynamics priority area special competition on Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU).
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0.961 |
2007 — 2012 |
Olson, Donald (co-PI) [⬀] Olson, Donald (co-PI) [⬀] Katz, Richard Podesta, Guillermo Letson, David Broad, Kenneth |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Cnh: Collaborative Research: Interactions Between Changing Climate and Technological Innovations in Agricultural Decision Making: Implications For Land Use and Sustainability @ University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine&Atmospheric Sci
Agriculture plays a central role in global food production and food security, and is among the societal sectors most vulnerable to climate variability and change. A marked increase in rainfall since the 1970s has contributed to major changes in land use in the Pampas of Argentina, the focus of this study: continuous cropping has widely replaced ecologically-sound agriculture-pasture rotations. Nevertheless, production systems that evolved partly in response to increased rainfall may not be viable if (as is entirely possible) climate reverts to a drier epoch. As there is much uncertainty about projected paths of future climate, particularly on regional scales and short time horizons (25-30 years hence), this project will explore various plausible climate scenarios to anticipate potential impacts on agricultural systems together with advances in agricultural technology that may affect productivity and vulnerability to climate. The central goal of this study is to improve understanding of linkages between agricultural ecosystems, uncertain decadal climate trajectories, technological innovations that decrease vulnerability to climate stresses, human decision-making, and land use and tenure changes over periods of a few decades. To achieve this goal, the investigators will build scenarios of inter-decadal climate variability; assess the impacts of climate variability on current and adapted agricultural production systems; simulate biological and economic effects of genetically-improved crops tolerant to drought stress; study the diffusion of this technological innovation; (5) develop models of individual decision-making and use these models to assess emerging regional-scale patterns of land use and land tenure and their implications for sustainability of production systems.
Agricultural production involves real-world decisions with important economic consequences, and thus is a useful test bed to understand decision-making in complex natural-human systems. This project will develop new insights on decision-making processes in agriculture, including individual and group learning, and adaptation to plausible climate changes. On a broader scale, the research will implement tools to assess the regional implications of climate change in the next 25-30 years, a scale relevant to resource management, and infrastructure and investment planning. Climate fluctuations will be explored in the context of important technological changes that may shape agriculture over the next decades. One highlight of the project is the active involvement of farmers and operational producers of climate information (the Argentine Met Service) that guarantee the relevance of the research, facilitate and demand outreach, and ensures stakeholders'' ownership of the process. Finally, similarity in experienced climate fluctuations, production scale, technology and crops grown, and land tenure regimes of the Pampas to those in the US Midwest suggest a broader relevance of the project''s results.
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1 |
2009 — 2013 |
Chen, Shuyi (co-PI) [⬀] Broad, Kenneth Meyer, Robert |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research: Understanding Dynamic Responses to Hurricane Warnings - Implications For Communication and Research @ University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine&Atmospheric Sci
Recent increases in losses of lives and property from hurricanes in the United States have underscored the need to develop more effective ways to warn residents of approaching storms. Though physical scientists have made great advances in forecasting the movement and strength of storms, we know much less about how residents utilize and interpret the range of forecasts products provided to the public, and how these forecasts affect decisions to take protective action. The goal of this research is to gain this knowledge using a web-based computer simulation that allows residents to "live through" a hypothetical storm event by watching hypothetical weather broadcasts, and speaking with virtual friends and neighbors about the approaching storm.
This new technique will allow the research team to answer such basic questions as how residents make use of different media (such as television, the web, and word-of-mouth) over time as a hurricane threat evolves, and which media are most effective in triggering decisions to take protective action. In addition, by varying the content of broadcasts and the nature of the storm threat, the research will enable investigation of factors that could potentially impair preparedness-such as repeated exposure to "false alarms", or forecasts of storms that do not materialize. Armed with such knowledge, the research will hopefully contribute to an understanding of the best way to communicate warnings so as to maximize public preparedness.
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1 |
2010 — 2017 |
Orlove, Benjamin (co-PI) [⬀] Krantz, David (co-PI) [⬀] Weber, Elke (co-PI) [⬀] Broad, Kenneth |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Dmuu: Understanding and Improving Environmental Decisions
Decisions about "green electrical generation" are made both by energy consumers (who may choose to pay something extra) and by energy providers (who may choose to develop green power and to offer it to consumers). Social and environmental goals of both consumers and providers play an important role in this, as do social expectations about choices of green power by others. The interdisciplinary research program to be undertaken by this collaborative group, the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, will focus on the social processes underlying group decisions (for example, the decision to develop or offer green options) as well as on processes underlying individual or household decisions (such as selection among different energy plans). Recent research on decision making has highlighted the importance of decision architecture -- the features of a decision setting that affect how preferences are constructed. Examples include whether outcomes are framed as gains or losses, what option is designated as default, and what temporal horizon is implied in the setting. The investigators will explore how decision architecture affects environmental decisions, especially those that are made in a social context and that usually involve uncertainty, long time horizon, and a mixture of goals, including social goals. The investigators will address social processes, decision architecture, and the use of technical information (including forecasts of climate variability and longer-term climate change) in environmental decision making by conducting laboratory experiments and field studies, the latter particularly focused on regions where there are useful year-to-year and decadal-scale forecasts of climate variation and significant impacts of this variation on livelihoods.
This collaborative group's work will enhance basic understanding about social processes and decision architecture. It also will advance decision design for complex climate-related decisions that involve long time scales, great uncertainty, and interdependence; and it will provide new insights regarding how technical information is used. It also will provide practical information and insights for multiple stakeholders at field sites, such as water managers, farming communities, insurance companies, and communities near retreating glaciers. The group's work also will provide new perspectives about the close collaboration and integration of social and natural science research. This collaborative group project is supported by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) competition.
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0.961 |
2010 — 2017 |
Premaratne, Kamal (co-PI) [⬀] Englehardt, James [⬀] Kubat, Miroslav (co-PI) [⬀] Broad, Kenneth Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Efri-Seed: Design For Autonomous Net-Zero Water Buildings
The objective of this EFRI-SEED project is to develop principles for the design of net-zero water buildings, off the water grid. These principles represent a paradigm shift from centralized reduction of oxygen demand, to energy-minimal conveyance and permanent destruction of pharmaceuticals, responsive to technological evolution. Three knowledge barriers are addressed: sustainable treatment system scaling and design; sociocultural and architectural acceptance; and real-time risk assessment. Concepts for system scaling will mimic energy minimal allometric scaling relationships in biological circulatory systems. New energy-minimal electrocatalytic treatment for effective destruction of pharmaceuticals will be advanced. Energy-intensive reverse osmosis (RO) treatment will be avoided through cistern drinking and make-up water, low-flow adaptation of new cloth filtration technology, and metallic iron-mediated filtration. To surmount acceptance barriers, behavioral simulations, interviews, and focus groups will first identify individual and group barriers to adoption and then test approaches for improving sociocultural acceptability. Design components including cisterns, residuals storage, annual maintenance, and natural water releases will be considered within the theoretical framework of New Urbanist architecture. Methods of evidence fusion will be developed for machine-learned assessment of in-vitro toxicity from fluorescence spectra, to advance real-time risk monitoring and to ensure system safety.
System design concepts will directly address the energetics of water and wastewater conveyance, representing 15% of U.S. electric power generation, and leverage emerging capability for automated treatment, monitoring, and decentralized operation and maintenance. De facto reuse of surface water consisting largely of treated wastewater would be replaced with explicitly engineered control. Water rationing, and treatment of hardness, arsenic, and boron, and other geologic impurities, would be largely obviated. Treatment would be designed to routinely, permanently destroy pharmaceuticals, addressing widespread biotic feminization. Benefits will propagate through the engagement of a new generation in their future, immersed by living in a dedicated, cross-disciplinary, undergraduate ~20-bed retrofitted dorm unit with design input by students. Well-represented Caribbean and Latin student populations will continue to be involved along with participating agencies and industry partners, for immersion in terms of research, industrial partnerships, public tours, and 1-2 high school student projects (MAST Academy). A Capstone Net-Zero Water Workshop will include regulators, consulting firms, students, and faculty.
The FY 2010 EFRI-SEED Topic that supports this project was sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorates for Engineering (ENG), Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE), and Computer & Information Science and Engineering in collaboration with the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
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1 |
2011 — 2016 |
Broad, Kenneth Swart, Peter [⬀] Pourmand, Ali Clement, Amy |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
P2c2: High-Resolution Records of Rapid Climate Change in Speleothem Records From the Bahamas @ University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine&Atmospheric Sci
This award supports team of researchers to investigate the hypothesis that aridification in Northern Africa and cooling in the North Atlantic Ocean, associated with Heinrich events, are recorded in the chemical composition of stalagmites from the Bahamas during periods of low sea level.
The team's science strategy is to combine geochemical analysis of speleothems with regional modeling in order to gain a better understanding of the signatures and physical mechanisms of rapid climate change in the tropical/sub-tropical Atlantic. The Bahamian stalagmites occur in caves which are now flooded by seawater. The researchers have collected submerged samples from depths up to 35 meters below the present sea level.
These stalagmites formed during periods when sea-level was lower than the present time and ceased growing either when sea-level flooded the caves or when climate conditions became arid and there ceased to be sufficient water to support speleothem formation. The speleothems have been preliminarily dated and separated into three age groups of 14,000-80,000 yrs, 200,000-250,000 yrs, and 300,000-350,000 yrs.
The broader impacts include outreach activities in the Bahamas, where the researchers will work with local environmental organizations to raise awareness of the effects of sea-level rise. The project also includes support for two graduate students and opportunities for undergraduate students and high school interns to obtain laboratory and research experience.
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1 |
2012 — 2017 |
Weber, Elke (co-PI) [⬀] Broad, Kenneth Metcalfe, Janet [⬀] Meyer, Robert |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Decisions From Experience and the Role of Feedback in Environmental Decisions
Despite frequent and vivid reminders of the destruction that natural disasters can leave in their wake, compliance rates with evacuation orders and support for mitigation efforts remain troublingly low. One possible contributing factor to this apparent under-weighting of the risk from environmental hazards is the fact that when making decisions between uncertain outcomes in laboratory studies, people appear to treat rare events differently if their probabilities are learned through sampling and feedback (experience), as opposed to summary statistics (descriptions). Despite a recent surge in laboratory research on this topic, it is not yet clear how, or whether, this effect applies in the far more complex environment of real-world decisions about hazard preparedness. The current research project systematically investigates how learning about environmental hazards through personal experience affects people's perceptions of (and therefore their actions in response to) such dangers. The results provide a framework for scientists and policymakers to better understand how the public's personal experience with those natural hazards might interact with -- or override -- the descriptive warning information they disseminate. Appreciation of the psychological hurdles to the understanding or use of such information can improve the influence of hazard forecasts, increasing compliance with warnings and protective measures.
The Description-Experience (DE) Gap in risky choice describes the shift from Prospect Theory's predicted over-weighting of rare events when probabilities are learned through summary statistics (description), to an apparent under-weighting of small probabilities when learning occurs through repeated feedback (experience). This research program develops methods to extend existing findings about the DE gap into laboratory paradigms that more closely address the complexities inherent to real-world environmental decisions such as how to prepare for potential hazards. The research then validates existing findings through field studies that examine decisions from real-world experiences and assess the validity of prior results. Field studies integrate choice problems used in the laboratory studies into realistic paradigms, and test the boundaries of the type, timing, and valence of feedback typically used in DE gap studies. By converging evidence from well-controlled laboratory tasks and the richer, more complex set of real-world choices that people face every day, this program of research addresses current theory more thoroughly and effectively than either approach could alone. Insight into how provision of probability and outcome information in different ways affects real-world decisions illuminates ways of communicating information about environmental hazards to increase the likelihood that people will take protective action.
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0.961 |
2013 — 2017 |
Broad, Kenneth Weisskoff, Richard (co-PI) [⬀] Ault, Jerald (co-PI) [⬀] Letson, David |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Wsc-Category 2 Collaborative: Robust Decision-Making For South Florida Water Resources by Ecosystem Service Valuation, Hydro-Economic Optimization and Conflict Resolution Modeling @ University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine&Atmospheric Sci
Water management in south Florida is characterized by the need to balance multiple objectives. Among the objectives are the maintenance of high groundwater levels to limit seawater intrusion and flood control measures that are also used to mitigate dry-season water shortages. In addition, south Florida's current population of 6 million is projected to grow to 10 million over the next 20 years, and urban water demand must be reliably managed. In this exceptionally vulnerable region, sea level rise and salt water intrusion have already impacted drinking water supplies and threaten the integrity of low-lying and highly-valued built and natural environments as diverse as Miami Beach and the Everglades. Long-term adaptive strategies are needed to ensure sustainable water resources for expanding populations, agriculture, and wetlands that serve multiple functions, including support of Florida's fishing industry. Development of such strategies has been hampered by conflicting stakeholder interests and technical, economic, and political challenges. This project will conduct highly interdisciplinary research, utilizing the expertise of multiple institutions, to investigate the hydrologic, economic, ecologic, and human behavioral dimensions of sustainable water management and land use planning under various climate change, economic, population, and sea level rise scenarios. The research will employ hydro-economic optimization approaches based on robust decision making to develop management strategies that ensure the resilience of water supplies for the built and natural systems, while also accounting for the broad-sector value of water use. Optimization criteria will incorporate the results of project research linking water management, ecological function, and the economic value of ecosystem services. New experimental approaches will be implemented to better understand the impacts of scenario information type and uncertainty on both selection of decision criteria and evaluation of model predictions among individuals and groups of local stakeholders. These experiments are designed to improve understanding of the roles of cognitive and perceptual biases in decision-making when stakeholders examine hydro-economic projections coupled with scenario forecasts. Comparative behavioral analyses of stakeholder evaluations and institutional decision-making will provide unique insights into how information type, information content, and cognitive biases combine to influence risk perception, and how the perceived risks to individual and collective well-being influence scenario selection. Finally, with agency and stakeholder involvement, the project will collaboratively develop recommendations for adaptive water management plans that foster long-term support from the stakeholders.
Low-lying coastal regions subject to sea level rise, climate change, and diverse water demands, including growing populations, will benefit from the development of innovative, pragmatic approaches to optimizing the social-ecological benefits of water resources allocation. The research will include novel approaches for dynamically incorporating economics into stakeholder evaluations of adaptive land use and water management strategies. Local, state, and federal agencies responsible for managing south Florida's water resources will benefit from analyses of adaptive schemes that explicitly incorporate uncertainty estimates of potential outcomes. The multiple societies that exist in south Florida, whose options for managing public water resources are limited by climatic, physical, and/or legal constraints, require this type of integrated assessment to promote cooperative decision-making while preparing for uncertain hydro-climatic conditions and socioeconomic futures.
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1 |
2015 — 2017 |
Orlove, Benjamin [⬀] Krantz, David (co-PI) [⬀] Weber, Elke (co-PI) [⬀] Broad, Kenneth |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Dmuu: Center For Research On Environmental Decisions: Understanding and Improving Environmental Decisions
This collaborative group will continue ongoing efforts to study individual and group decision making under climate uncertainty and decision making in the face of environmental risk. The researchers will focus on synthesizing theoretical and empirical results of studies conducted over the last ten years in areas such as agriculture and water management. Three themes have connected the various research projects: the presentation and use of scientific information, the role of social context across different scales, and the effects of decision architecture. The collaborative group will synthesize project results generated across different sectors, cultures, and theoretical frameworks. The focus will be on the development of products that benefit the broad academic and practitioner communities, such as a book, educational videos, and tutorials. These materials will be available to inform future studies of environmental decision goals and processes and the communication of scientific information related to environmental science in order to motivate sustainability. The collaborative group will maintain its international network of expertise and researchers through virtual connections.
The investigators will synthesize theoretical and empirical results from their prior research generated across different sectors, cultures, and theoretical frameworks and translate those results into a form accessible to other researchers. Synthesis and integration efforts of sector-based field project results (in the areas of climate, water, hazards, energy) will enable researchers to infer the influence of central constructs from cognitive and social psychology in environmental perception and decisions. Comparing findings across sectors, particularly pertaining to the description-experience gap, will allow researchers to disentangle the effect of different elements of personal experience. Synthesis activities will focus on choice architecture, where behavioral decision theories and insights are turned into interventions. A meta-analysis of the relative effectiveness of different choice architecture interventions in different domains and with different populations of decision makers will generate a matrix, including data from this collaborative group and others. This collaborative group project is supported by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) funding opportunity.
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0.961 |
2019 — 2020 |
Broad, Kenneth Moore, Amelia |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Rapid: Reformulating Networks of Security, Sustainability, and Survival: the Emergence of An Atlantic Storm Society @ University of Rhode Island
Hurricane Dorian hit the northern Bahamas in September 2019 as a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds up to 185 mph, gusts over 200 mph, prolonged rains, and 20-foot surge. The aftermath of this storm event continues to unfold across geographic scales involving local, national, regional, and international social networks. By examining the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, while networks of response are still being created and reformulated, it is possible to begin identifying and characterizing the emergence of a coastal storm society that is able to respond to the increasingly pervasive threat of recurrent major storms. This reformulated society that is taking shape as a result of Dorian has the potential to reformulate vital networks within persistent and chronic conditions of uncertainty, thereby increasing community resilience. Findings will be disseminated to aid organizations involved in disaster recovery efforts. Reports will offer practitioners and researchers of humanitarian aid/ disaster response a model for a more robust assessment tools that leverages local resilience. The research also builds scientific research capacity through international collaboration, broadens the participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences, and trains undergraduate and graduate students in methods of rigorous, scientific data collection and analysis.
This RAPID award supports the collection of critical but ephemeral data on the new forms of social dissolution and cohesion formulated across local and regional scales in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian. In exploring issues of security, governance,and belonging, the project asks what new forms of social cohesion and infrastructure are emerging, how and to what they are adapting, and what events, processes and technologies enable or frustrate these networks. Methods include on-site participant observation and targeted semi-structured interviews (n=300) with displaced residents and rescue organizations. Data will be compared with over 20 years of previously collected research on social relations in the region, which will provide a baseline in understanding shifting and emergent social forms and socio-infrastructures.
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.
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0.972 |