In less than a decade, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, Florence, Michael, Laura, Ida, and Ian have each cost the U.S. more than $25 billion in damages, destroying homes and businesses, and upending life in hundreds of communities. The devastation repeats. 

The current system for managing natural disaster risk in the U.S. has evolved over time but is still widely acknowledged to be problematic, insufficient, and short sighted. Community resilience to hurricane wind and flood damage remains challenging to achieve in practice, especially when also considering the issues of equity, economic prosperity, and climate change. This is where the Hub comes in.

We hypothesize that part of our inability to find sustainable solutions that mitigate the effects of hurricanes is that we have overlooked the competing goal of economic prosperity. This prevents affected and vulnerable populations from being able to break the cycle of destruction and achieve resilience

The CHEER Hub aims to provide a new approach to managing hurricane risk by focusing on three competing goals: economic growth, equity, and hurricane resilience. Each of these challenges on its own is a complex and expansive topic, so it is daunting to consider addressing all of them together. It is the tension among the three community goals and the dynamic context of the climate that is challenging coastal communities. To make a leap forward in sustainable risk reduction, resilience, equity, economic prosperity, and climate change cannot be considered in isolation. These interactions are the focus of this CoPe hub.

In particular, the Hub identifies and explains how equity and economic development shape resilience to hazards and vice versa, and the influence of climate change on all three goals. We represent these ideas in a mathematical modeling framework to quantitatively explore their complex interactions. Equity and economic prosperity have been virtually absent from previous engineering models developed to support risk management decision-making. The Hub focuses on households and housing, which play critical roles in equity, economic prosperity, and resilience. Recognizing this effort requires an active approach. We are applying lessons from and contributing to the scholarship of convergent research.