Grantee Research Project Results

Building Community Resilience to Natural-disaster-Driven Contaminant Exposures Through System-level Risk Analysis, Management, and Readiness

EPA Grant Number: R840041
Title: Building Community Resilience to Natural-disaster-Driven Contaminant Exposures Through System-level Risk Analysis, Management, and Readiness
Investigators: Borsuk, Mark E.
Institution: Duke University
EPA Project Officer: Aja, Hayley
Project Period: August 1, 2020 through July 31, 2023 (Extended to July 31, 2024)
Project Amount: $799,756
RFA: Contaminated Sites, Natural Disasters, Changing Environmental Conditions and Vulnerable Communities: Research to Build Resilience (2019) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Sustainable and Healthy Communities , Safer Chemicals

Objective:

The overarching goal of the proposed project is to assist communities in developing comprehensive strategies for building resilience to contaminant releases associated with natural hazards. We propose to accomplish this via the following objectives:

Develop a generalizable and comprehensive risk analysis framework that links natural hazards and changing environmental conditions to the release, fate, and transport of contaminants.
Collaborate with community partners to identify factors that may modify exposure and vulnerability of certain populations and include such factors in our framework to holistically assess health risks.
Assist communities in translating scientific products into realistic and relevant management and readiness plans that promote community resilience to natural hazards.

Approach:

We will develop a systems model in the form of a Bayesian Network that articulates interacting meteorological, contaminant release and transport, human exposure, and epidemiological processes within a unified probabilistic framework. This approach will provide urgently needed capacity to characterize risks that result from as-yet poorly defined interactions across natural, technological, and socio-economic systems. We will leverage the deep expertise of our interdisciplinary team in environmental engineering, public and environmental health, planning, environmental justice, and community engagement, with our experience structuring complex socio-environmental processes into quantitative risk analysis frameworks. Crucially, knowledge generated by this project will be co-produced with long-standing partners from two specific communities at risk of natural-disaster-driven contaminant exposures. This close collaboration will enable translation of models and results into improved community readiness and resilience.

Expected Results:

Planned outputs of this project include: a generalizable, modular tool to evaluate risks of contaminant exposures to vulnerable communities under diverse natural hazard conditions and scenarios; specific model-based analyses and field study of one urban and one rural community, with a focus on young children and the elderly; strategies for risk mitigation, such as awareness campaigns, health promotion, and emergency readiness plans, co-developed with community stakeholders. Project outcomes include: a generalizable framework for quantification of the additional risks borne by vulnerable populations including low-income families, children, and the elderly resulting from poorly understood vulnerabilities; enhanced readiness of communities to natural-disaster-driven contaminant exposures; and better quality and length of life in vulnerable urban and rural populations.

Publications and Presentations:

Publications have been submitted on this project: View all 5 publications for this project

Journal Articles:

Journal Articles have been submitted on this project: View all 1 journal articles for this project

Supplemental Keywords:

community-engaged research; total environment; sustainable and healthy communities; southeast; industry; agriculture; natech; community partnership

Progress and Final Reports:

The perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.