September 10, 2024
UC Berkeley's Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research recently sponsored an Interdisciplinary Climate & Equity Seed Grant program to "support the formation of interdisciplinary teams to prepare for external funding opportunities to advance innovative and integrative interdisciplinary understandings and approaches to the study of Climate and Environmental Equity."
Two CCRM members--Anna Serra-Llobet and Adda Athanasopoulos-Zekkos--received support for a project entitled "Developing new methods and tools to integrate climate and environmental equity in flood risk management." Flooding disproportionately affects poor communities in the U.S., but there is no holistic approach for incorporating equity concerns into flood risk management. Social Vulnerability indexes (SVIs) are sometimes used to allocate funding, but they have been criticized as unidimensional, and as failing to integrate different aspects of equity. Furthermore, they are not designed to be used at a local scale since they are based on coarse and limited data. The project's main research questions are: What are the flaws of the methods used to integrate equity into flood risk management? And are there more effective methods to do that? New innovative tools can allow us to assess and communicate flood risk differently and in a more targeted way at a local scale. “Digital twins" — digital representations of both technical and social infrastructures of the community — are now used in Austria (and elsewhere) to simulate and visualize different scenarios of flood risk. Based on a pilot case study in Pájaro, California, this project explore the use of this technology to integrate equity concerns into flood risk management at a local scale