Strengthening Disaster Resilience in Rural Communities through Rural Resource Access Hubs (RRAH).

Compared to dense urban areas, rural residents face unique challenges due to relative geographic isolation and distance from support systems that urban areas afford[1] [2].As such, rural communities, defined here as communities with a small population and/or low population density, often rely more on social cohesion or social capital that largely influences their communities' preparation, recovery, and overall resilience to extreme weather events and natural disaster hazards [3].Hurricanes, flooding, heat waves, and wildfires are examples of extreme weather events. A lack of spatial connectivity becomes especially acute during a disaster if roadways, bridges, power grids, or other critical infrastructure incur significant damage. A disruption in any one system may affect others. For instance, power grid failure may affect many services from water treatment to connectivity to public healthcare facilities. In addition, extreme events can exacerbate food insecurity, such as when food waste or food scarcity occurs due to power out ages in the aftermath of an extreme weather event or mandatory evacuation.

This project develops theories and algorithms to support "service on wheels" that provides critical supplies transported by vehicles, which delivers needed resources to rural communities before extreme weather events. The mobility of service-on-wheels can enable new resource-sharing services for disaster preparation. This service model matches the surplus of resources scattered across communities and mobilizes them to meet the demands of service receivers in need. This project will demonstrate one use case of service-on-wheels by developing a Rural Resource Access Hub(RRAH) that provides mobility of services to support rural communities in preparing for and recovering from extreme weather events. When extreme weather is projected to impact a rural community, RRAH connects with established community services, such as Departments of Emergency Management, to take actions that strengthen the community's ability to cope before, during and after the disaster. These actions could include providing proactive food storage to reduce food waste resulting from power outages and the information on the locations of shelters, localized risks, safety procedures, and updating residents' contact info and special needs registries. In the aftermath of extreme weather events, RRAH aids the impacted community by providing post-disaster services that could include the capacity to cook, refrigerate and freeze food, a power hub (driven by plug-and-play solar and energy storage)where residents can charge electronic devices, and a wireless server or satellite Wi-Fi service (e.g., Starlink) to increase bandwidth for residents in the affected area. In providing these essential services, RRAH doubles as a social gathering place where rural residents can connect, comfort, support each other, and share resources.

For this Accelerator project, we will mainly focus on the food loss caused by power outages during disasters to enhance rural food resilience and sustainability. In particular, we will consider the two recent hurricanes (Ian and Michael) as case studies to understand the food loss of residents in inland central Florida and panhandle rural areas during the two hurricanes collecting survey data, combined with Census data, mandatory hurricane evacuation orders, social media data, and duration of power outages to refine the area of focus further. The team aims to answer three fundamental research questions: (1) How can we predict/estimate potential food loss in rural households and communities during extreme weather events? (2) Are some demographics within rural communities more likely to experience food loss and food scarcity following extreme weather events? If so, what attributes contribute to this disparity? (3) What actions would be most beneficial to increase the resilience and sustainability of food supplies in rural communities during extreme weather events?

The answers to the above research questions are   nontrivial due to real-world data unavailability and problem complexity.  This  interdisciplinary  research  team  will  collaboratively  address  the  following challenges for a multi-year effort to improve the resilience and sustainability of rural communities: (1) data acquisition including surveys, arts  -based research methods, public census data, historical disasters , and data scraping social media from affected populations before and after the event; (2) data-driven modeling based on statistics and machine learning to understand the pressing food waste and needs, especially  latent  waste  and  demands  not  explicitly  reported  from  surveys,  and  where  and  which groups/regions are more vulnerable to those extreme weather events, thereby providing service packages customized to different rural areas leveraging experiences from urban areas; and    (3) optimization of sharing existing rural/urban resources empowered by RRAH to reduce investment and operating costs of service on wheels, increase the resilience of rural communities, and increase the overall utilization of the shared resource. The major activities are shown in Fig. 1.

The outcome of this project will deliver a tool for assessing the food waste and needs of rural communities and fundamental methods to recommend service schedules based on resource sharing before, during, and after extreme weather events. In addition, the data collected for each event will be analyzed and synthesized to understand better the common and unique disaster needs that unfold during and after an event and how these hubs can better meet those needs moving forward.  In this way, this research facilitates ongoing learning and adjustment to address disaster resilience that can be responsive to each community's unique characteristics and needs. This project can also deliver demo simulations based on disaster scenarios to communicate the necessity of this service with potential stakeholders, thereby contributing to the development of smart and connected rural communities. The long-term goal of this project is to develop sustainable and resilient rural communities based on well   -designed visualization tools (e.g., dashboards) to help local governments make better decisions for disasters. The project scope fits the National Science Foundation's Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) program.

Figure 1. Major Activities of this Project

The outcome of this project will deliver a tool for assessing the food waste and needs of rural communities and fundamental methods to recommend service schedules based on resource sharing before, during, and after extreme weather events. In addition, the data collected for each event will be analyzed and synthesized to understand better the common and unique disaster needs that unfold during and after an event and how these hubs can better meet those needs moving forward.  In this way, this research facilitates ongoing learning and adjustment to address disaster resilience that can be responsive to each community's unique characteristics and needs. This project can also deliver demo simulations based on disaster scenarios to communicate the necessity of this service with potential stakeholders, thereby contributing to the development of smart and connected rural communities.

The long-term goal of this project is to develop sustainable and resilient rural communities based on well -designed visualization tools (e.g., dashboards) to help local governments make better decisions for disasters. The project scope fits the National Science Foundation's Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) program.