Community and Infrastructure Resilience to Climate-geological Long-term Effects (CIRCLE)

Climate change and related perils pose direct threats to coastal communities and accelerate the accumulation of disaster impacts, thereby shortening times between successive hazardous events. Without pre-disaster recovery plans, communities will be trapped in a negative spiral of dwindling community capacity and resources and unable to cope with future disasters. Since community disaster resilience is a shared

responsibility among citizens, municipalities, and governments, it is imperative for all stakeholders to co-develop disaster risk mitigation strategies and implement them in a cooperative approach.

The project aims to empower vulnerable global populations under climate-geological risks through community-participatory approaches for disaster resilience by focusing on coastal communities in Canada, Cuba, and Indonesia. There are significant differences in the community's capability and available resources to cope with and adapt to future climate risks in these three countries. Within these communities, significant

disparities and inequity regarding financial and human resources exist. The project integrates quantitative risk assessments of compounding climate-geological multi-hazards and physically interconnected infrastructures (community resilience stress-testing) and qualitative socioeconomic systems to identify the most vulnerable people in individual communities while recognizing the differences in cultural and social backgrounds.

The project team comprises (i) climate change and geological hazard scientists who will focus on the adaptive multi-hazard framework; (ii) infrastructure and systems specialists who will characterize and assess the physical and socioeconomic impacts of interrupted infrastructure and services; and (iii) social scientists who will work with local communities to develop risk mitigation and preparedness-recovery plans.

In the target communities in Canada, Cuba, and Indonesia, non-Indigenous and Indigenous people live with different socioeconomic conditions and cultural-value systems. Through the participatory community-driven disaster resilience approaches, the team will identify the key requirements of these different populations and co-produce tailored strategies for enhanced disaster risk reduction, which are enabled by innovative decision-support tools that can consider the complexity of compounding multi-hazard risks. Knowledge mobilization will facilitate the cross-pollination of Global North and South countries.