Stakeholder-based Tool for the Analysis of Regional Risk (STARR)
Our Research
Hub research will advance knowledge by identifying, explaining, and quantifying the complex interactions among the coastal community goals of equity, economic prosperity, and resilience to hurricane-related hazards, both now and in the future.
COMPUTATIONAL POLICY ANALYSIS TOOL
Hub researchers engage in a broad set of projects related to hazards, equity, economics, and resilience. However, our central focus is a collaborative effort to build a dynamic computational tool that can support policy design by modeling different scenarios, objectives, and constraints. Our Stakeholder-based Tool for the Analysis of Regional Risk (STARR) helps us achieve this mission by generating solutions that are more likely to garner support, achieve equity goals, and provide insight into win-win interventions that benefit both individual stakeholders and society at large.
This tool integrates decades of research on how households, governments, and insurance companies make decisions to recommend government policies (e.g., different incentives for home retrofits, property acquisition programs, or constraints on insurance pricing) and predicts how the other actors will respond to those policies. It also details the outcomes each stakeholder is likely to experience as coastal hazards and government policies change.
While STARR builds on years of previous work and is already able to perform some analyses, it is a dynamic tool that accounts for changing conditions over time. Each year, stakeholders make decisions based in part on variables describing population, buildings, demographics, hazards, and economic conditions. Government actors set policies and budgets, and insurers and households respond. Our team of researchers updates these variables to reflect changes due to the decisions and hazards.
A SYSTEMS APPROACH
Multiple Stakeholders
No single stakeholder can solve the problem of hurricane risk alone. The CHEER Hub explicitly acknowledges and accounts for the individual points-of-view of different stakeholders, including households, government agencies, and insurers. The Hub recognizes that each group has their own risk, objectives, alternatives, constraints, risk attitudes, timelines, and decision making processes. It therefore explicitly represents how they make their own decisions and interact with other stakeholders.
Multiple Strategies
No single intervention can solve the problem either. The CHEER framework accounts for multiple diverse interacting interventions–including property acquisition, retrofit grants, insurance, and land use policies–each of which has different costs, effects on risk, and benefits.
Interdisciplinary
The Hub tightly integrates insights from a broad range of disciplines. This includes the relationship between micro (e.g., individual-level decisions, culture, language) and macro (e.g., community, government, economy) aspects of social systems that reproduce loss and inequity. This value is also reflected in the Hub’s deliberately diverse team, including their researchers, staff members, and partnerships.
Conceptualization of Disasters
CHEER views disasters as a natural part of a community’s evolution rather than an unexpected exogenous event, and disaster risk management as inextricably interwoven with the normal activities of everyday life.
Intentional and Unintentional Processes in Everyday Life
The Hub considers the decisions and actions that are intended specifically to improve resilience to hazards, equity, or economic prosperity as well as those that unintentionally or indirectly influence them in some important way.
