Belmont Forum Collaborative Research:Data-driven Disaster Response Systems Dependent on Time of Day, Season and Location for Megacities

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries to address the growing need for assessment and reduction of disaster risk, collaborative co-design of resilience strategies with a breadth of stakeholders, and scientifically and technologically enhanced responses to disasters.

This award aims to design a replicable and transferrable information-sharing system for disaster preparedness and response in megacities. Such a system would inform immediate response in the face of rapid-onset disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, and fires. Case studies selected for this project are Tokyo, Taipei, and New York City due to their complex urban environments and diverse populations, which present a challenge for disaster management. To address dynamic disaster scenarios as well as the needs of vulnerable socio-economic groups in urban areas, this project will integrate both scenario-based and data-driven planning, while incorporating sensor data and stakeholder engagement. This work proposes to simulate earthquake and fires for Tokyo as well as floods for NYC and Taipei and response to these events. The study will attempt to improve damage prediction and response modeling and will design a real-time warning and response system for disaster management.

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.