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College of Arts and Sciences

Residential Risk Disclosure

The New First Line of Defense: Building Community Resilience through Residential Risk Disclosure
Subaward to USC: Dr. Susan Cutter (HVRI) and Dr. Tamara Sheldon (Moore School of Business)

Project Overview

Using the Gulf of Mexico Region as a test bed, this multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary (18 investigators) project is designed to leverage actionable information on disaster risk and mitigation alternatives in housing location and choices as the first-line of defense in making communities more resilience to hazards. Four thematic areas guide the work:

  1.  Examining location and housing decisions, specifically how potential renters and buyers understand hazard risk and mitigation options for housing;
  2. Identifying the range of residential mitigation options based on individual hazard assessments and building information;
  3. Understanding resilience dynamics, particularly determining the geospatial distribution of vulnerability, hazard risks, resilience, and mitigation opportunities and developing the actionable information into a user-center tool to support housing decision-making; and
  4. Providing interactive case study analyses on resilience strategies and policies at local scales, especially involving stakeholders in translating practice to refinements and testing of the HazardAware©tool.

HVRI is contributing to themes 2 and 3 by contributing data and downscaling computations for SoVI®and BRIC metrics in the study region and how to integrate such actionable data into the HazardAware©application. The Moore School contribution focuses on theme 1 in developing choice models for mitigation options and understanding risk.

Project Lead Investigators: Dr. Christopher T. Emrich (UCF) and Dr. Melanie Gall (ASU)

Funding: Gulf Research Program, Thriving Communities Program 

Publications:  Derakhshan, S., Blackwood, L., Habets, M., Effgen, J.F., Cutter, S.L. 2022. Prisoners of Scale: Downscaling Community Resilience Measurements for Enhanced UseSustainability 2022, 14, 6927. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14116927

Derakhshan, S., C.T. Emrich, and S.L. Cutter, 2022.  Degree and direction of overlap between social vulnerability and community resilience measurements, PLoS ONE 17(10):e0275975. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275975


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