Stakeholder-based Tool for the Analysis of Regional Risk (STARR)
STARR Framework
The centerpiece of CHEER is a software tool designed to inform the creation and analysis of government policies for regional disaster risk management.
COMPUTATIONAL POLICY ANALYSIS TOOL
STARR integrates decades of research to recommend interventions (e.g., incentives for home retrofits, property acquisition programs, or insurance) and predict how the other actors will respond to those policies. It also details the outcomes each stakeholder and the economy are likely to experience as coastal hazards and government policies change.
Importantly, STARR aims to generate solutions that are more likely to actually be implemented because they (1) align with natural way each stakeholder makes decisions, (2) aim to find win-win solutions that are better for everyone, and (3) address competing challenges of improved resilience and economic prosperity.
THREE INTENDED USES OF STARR
- Support policymaking by facilitating development, evaluation, and comparison of possible disaster risk management policies
- Facilitate understanding of the dynamic system of regional hurricane risk management, including interactions among stakeholder actions and the effects of changes in the context or assumptions
- Guide future research in a way that tightly integrates social science, physical science, and engineering contributions, demonstrating the interrelation among research advances, building on previous research, and identifying lingering gaps in knowledge.
A SYSTEMS APPROACH
Multiple Stakeholders
STARR explicitly acknowledges and accounts for the individual points-of-view of different stakeholders, including households, government agencies, community partners, and insurers. This tool recognizes that each group has their own risk, objectives, alternatives, constraints, risk attitudes, timelines, and decision making processes. It explicitly represents how they make their own decisions and interact with other stakeholders.
Multiple Strategies
No single intervention can solve the problem either. STARR 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
STARR 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.
Probabilistic and Dynamic
STARR is stochastic to represent the uncertainties, especially in hazard occurrence, that make disaster risk management so challenging, and it is dynamic to capture changes in the built environment and economic and societal context over time.
Flexible and Modular
STARR allows many analysis variations to accommodate a range of assumptions, questions, and specific uses.
