In the field of natural hazards damage mitigation, the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported CHEER Hub seeks to close the gap between practical solutions for preventing hurricane damage and their real-world implementation. CHEER, which stands for Coastal Hazards, Equity, Economic prosperity, and Resilience, is a five-year, $16.5M project and is part of the Coastlines and People program, CoPe.

Principal investigator and director of the CHEER Hub is University of Delaware Professor Rachel Davidson. She is also a core faculty member of the Disaster Research Center.

With equity and economic growth in mind, the CHEER Hub is developing a policy analysis software tool to help design and evaluate hurricane risk at a regional level. It is similar to tools such as HAZUS, developed by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), and IN-CORE, developed by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). But the CHEER Hub framework has a distinct emphasis on decision-making. It is called the Stakeholder-based Tool for the Analysis of Regional Risk, or STARR.

Continue reading the story here. To learn more about this collaboration, visit NHERI’s website or the CHEER’s Partners page.