Bethany Cutts

"Real world issue: Post-disaster, rural areas face a predictable pattern of resource flush, drawdown, and abandonment. In small towns and diverse communities, positive social, economic, and environmental impacts from these investments are often short-lived. A consequence is that scientifically-informed strategies designed to defend and harden economically valued coastal areas may have the unintended consequences of coercing buyouts, forcing relocation, and limiting environmental protections for vulnerable upstream communities, potentially to the detriment of the coastal fisheries and tourism opportunities being defended in the first place. In contrast to emergency-focused disaster work, watershed-based environmental planning is intended to be slower, strategic, and more adept at identifying and addressing chronic threats to and opportunities for environmental improvement and protection. Therefore, it stands to reason that integration between watershed governance and disaster recovery might provide a unique opportunity to create a network able to identify and focus energy on advocacy for change that connects people and sustains attention on the harms of maladaptive policies. Plan for proposed work: This study aims to identify opportunities to transform watershed governance to overcome chronic environmental justice challenges and their capacity to erode resilience following disasters. In addition to providing needed theoretical and methodological advances in social network analytics, this study could lead to better understanding of the links policy and advocacy link between ����������������just��������������� watershed governance and disaster resilience. The central research question is: Which properties of watershed governance enable (or constrain) environmental justice in disaster-prone coastal communities and to what extent do they resist predatory influences as the coronavirus pandemic unfolds? If, as we hypothesize, the three objectives are interrelated, then a JustWater framework will reveal connections between disaster and watershed governance policy arenas. To establish that coastal water injustice is, in fact, a problem of governance, we will investigate the well-documented watershed governance initiatives and environmental justice struggles in the Lumbee River Basin. We will pursue the following objectives: (1) Quantify impacts of disaster on formal and informal watershed governance systems using social network analytics. (2) Integrate analysis of political power and inequality with perceptions of governance outcomes by combining network analytics with interviews. (3) Analyze factors that change the values and beliefs embedded in policy proposals and governance procedures. Rationale for public support: This work will produce policy-relevant knowledge that will benefit the disaster and environmental management in the Lumbee River basin and create a transferrable protocol for evaluating potential synergies between disaster and watershed management coalitions. Results and protocols from data scraping initiatives, questionnaires, focus groups, and workshops will evaluate the process and outcomes of collaboration through a justice-centered lens. Outcomes and realistic impacts: The research results will be the just water governance aims of the Carolina coastlines. Secondary beneficiaries include the NC Disaster Management team, NC Inclusive Disaster Network, and Robeson County Cooperative for Sustainable Development and local municipalities participating in a community-university research/action partnership established in 2016. The partnership has a robust record of training students (UNC-Pembroke, NCSU) and community members in data collection, analysis, and dissemination. "

Despite many benefits of urban greening, tree-planting programs in diverse communities nationwide often face strong local resistance, especially on private lands. This resistance impacts the success of initiatives such as Green Heart, an urban greening effort in Louisville, KY, designed to create healthier neighborhoods by encouraging tree planting to mitigate air pollution. Working with leaders of Green Heart, our project will investigate various factors (social and/or environmental) that influence the success of greening interventions and identify environmentally just practices to promote healthy urban communities across the US. Using Louisville as a case study, with lessons learned from other cities, we aim to: (1) Synthesize current state of knowledge regarding public support for urban greening across diverse communities; (2) Identify factors associated with tree-planting program success; (3) Examine public perceptions of relationships between urban trees, health, and neighborhood change; and (4) Define and share best practices to promote a national community of practice focused on equitable and inclusive urban greening. Our efforts will culminate in a ����������������best practice��������������� guide and toolkit, shared with a growing national community of practice promoting social equity in urban forestry. Ultimately, the project will identify strategies to promote urban greening with communities, not just within communities.����������������

This project will identify how energy poverty identification is affected by changing spatial scales of analysis in North Carolina. Research outcomes from this will research provide context for the identification of energy poverty in North Carolina. Specifically, they will provide context for community and government decision-makers to understand the impacts of spatial analysis. This work will be done in 2 parts. The first part be a multi-scalar spatial model that compares components of energy poverty indicators between four geographic scales to understand how these changes alter what main energy indicators present at these levels. The second part will combine actual energy use data and with indicators to characterize how the detection of energy poverty changes by the scale of analysis.

On September 6th, 2019 Hurricane Dorian made landfall on North Carolina������������������s Outer Banks, causing historic flooding and widespread damage across tourism-dependent barrier island communities. Two communities, Ocracoke and Hatteras islands, were among the hardest hit. As Hurricane Dorian recovery efforts began, the COVID-19 pandemic substantially altered recovery within the tourism sector. Fragile, outdated infrastructure and limited access policies disrupted supply chains and workforce availability, significantly lengthening recovery efforts well into the 2020 hurricane season. Once access was restored, the tourism industry in Hatteras and Ocracoke boomed with visitors seeking a ����������������safe��������������� escape from the pandemic, even while business owners were struggling to rebuild and housing shortages continued. The compounding crises of Hurricane Dorian and the COVID-19 pandemic have affected the decisions within the tourism industry in Hatteras and Ocracoke. Through an NSF-funded project ����������������RAPID: Disaster recovery decision making in remote tourism dependent communities��������������� the research team uncovered pathways of near-term decision making and integrating these decisions within a broader network of actors establishing a baseline for understanding disaster recovery in remote tourism-dependent communities. Through this research the need for a centralized location to integrate information sources and recovery resources, facilitate sharing of capacity strengths and weaknesses, and foster learning and partnerships among tourism-dependent coastal communities. This proposed project seeks to define inter-community, region-specific components (e.g., resources, information pathways, community interactions, and knowledge brokers) needed to create a virtual community-based disaster preparedness hub. The objectives of this project are designed to build upon the data from the NSF-funded project, by identifying existing community-based planning resources, hosting community focus groups to prioritize resources and actions the community members are willing to take, analyze the feedback from the focus groups, and develop a blueprint for a virtual community-based disaster preparedness hub. This process will identify the infrastructure and management foundations needed to establish and sustain the hub as well as how tourism-dependent community stakeholders would contribute to and utilize a virtual community-based disaster preparedness hub could advance knowledge and practice of resilience strategy development and planning efforts in coastal community contexts.

In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian severely impacted remote, tourism-dependent communities in the Outer Banks region of North Carolina. The communities of Ocracoke and Hatteras sustained the most infrastructure damage (e.g., businesses, homes, schools, power, potable water, transportation, and telecommunications). As recovery efforts begin, tourism business owners have to determine whether or not to reinvest, while individuals employed within the tourism industry have to determine whether or not they will remain. These decision processes include utilizing their hurricane experience (both past and present) and a variety of information sources within their local networks to inform perceptions of access to an available workforce or workforce housing, the availability of recovery resources, and the likelihood of future visitors, as well as perceptions of recovery risks. In turn, these perceptions influence recovery intentions and actual recovery decisions. This study specifically explores this decision making process in near-term, post-disaster contexts. The project has three objectives to: (1) identify the information networks accessed by individuals������������������ within the tourism industry to inform recovery decisions; (2) evaluate the extent to which recovery information activated through those networks is processed; and (3) document decision making pathways that influence risk perceptions and intended recovery decisions.

Rivers connect the social, economic, and ecological processes of inland communities to the coast. These connections became overwhelmingly apparent in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew. In October 2016, Hurricane Matthew brought extreme rainfall (up to 350 mm in 24 h) to parts of eastern North Carolina, resulting in flooding across Robeson County. Robeson County represents a region characterized by high rates of poverty and large disparities in healthcare, education, and infrastructure. We hypothesize that flood-related damages exposed Robeson residents (and downstream coastal communities) to new hazards and illuminated a need to examine hazards in light of larger relationships between resilience and vulnerability. To test this hypothesis, we propose to use an innovative methodological approach that combines interviews, participatory mapping, and public videos into a comprehensive community voice framework (CVM). Specific objectives include (a) analyzing the legitimacy of spatially explicit resilience-vulnerability models against community-generated definitions shared in interviews and (b) evaluating whether state and federal interventions following disaster present opportunities to disrupt pernicious patterns of disparity. Maps and video products created as a result of this work will inform scholarly efforts to reconcile theories of resilience and vulnerability. Results will be provided to residents and local decision-makers including Lumbee tribal leaders, recovery professionals, city planners, and community-based organizations. To extend the impact of our work beyond the life of the grant and limits of Robeson County, we will develop and pilot a protocol to empower a small museum/library/cultural center to document recovery experiences.

Rangelands in semi-arid and arid regions represent managed agroecosystems that provide wildlife habitat and multiple ecosystem services. However, these benefits are at risk from environmental change. In particular, shrub encroachment into grasslands is an important issue in many drylands worldwide. The overall goal of our project is to integrate ecological and social science approaches to understand how restoration efforts using shrub removal in the Chihuahuan Desert are affecting biodiversity and other ecosystem services across spatial and temporal scales. Such knowledge is needed to inform adaptive management by agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management that are attempting to produce resilient and sustainable landscapes. Managers need to know not only how much land to treat (including what would be too much), but also where treatments should be placed. Our overall hypothesis is that emergent properties at the landscape level will strongly determine the nature of and congruency of ecosystem services. This proposal will examine whether restoration efforts that remove shrubs are able to restore and retain ecosystem services over multiple spatial and temporal scales in the Chihuahuan Desert. Our research project has a set of interrelated specific objectives designed to meet our overall goal: (1) Determine how restoration efforts are affecting multiple aspects of animal diversity including songbirds, lizards, a keystone rodent, and scaled quail, a declining game bird. (2) Evaluate how these wildlife responses depend on landscape mosaic effects and time since treatment. (3) Determine responses of plant diversity to shrub removal. (4) Quantify how primary production and carrying capacity for livestock are affected by restoration treatments. (5) Determine whether reintroduction of a keystone species changes the pace of restoration trajectories and affects ecosystem services including primary production and livestock productivity. (6) Assess stakeholder interpretations of management success, and contrast perceptions among groups regarding ecosystem services being delivered from restored landscapes. (7) Integrate biodiversity, supporting services, provisioning services, and cultural ecosystem services into the assessment of socioecological systems. (8) Transfer knowledge gained about complementarities and trade-offs among biodiversity and other ecosystem services to land management agencies so future treatments can be advantageously placed to maximize benefits from rangelands.