Project Goals
The Project aims at enhancing the resilience of low-income communities living in disaster prone areas. The focus is on low-lying coastal zones in selected parts of Brazil, East Africa and Northe America that have high risks of floods. It develops the geographic and socio-economic knowledge of persons living in slums and riverbed areas by gathering georeferenced data on infrastructures and natural heritage of potential sites. The project team will also investigate technology adoption barriers and diffusion drivers through designing and prototyping an affordable, disaster-resilient, low-income housing systems that uses sustainable locally resourced materials.

Synopsis
This project is funded through the Belmont Forum Collaborative Research Action on disaster risk reduction solicitation, under an NSF award number 2019754. There is significant opportunity for well designed, constructed, and operated low income housing to contribute to positive health, well-being, prosperity, and social justice outcomes. Interdisciplinary approaches such as housing interventions that increase resilience during extreme weather events associated with climate change are needed to ensure prevention of common public health concerns in communities such as cholera, malaria, and diarrhea.  The kind of research, education and outreach that is required to accelerate the translation of evidence to policy and action in a way that will advance our efforts from  one-off pilots to scale at both the regional and global level to make sustainability and reliance the norm in low income requires working across disciplines, sectors and geographical regions. The methodologies, tools and approaches that are being used within this Disaster Research Risk Reduction initiative are anchored in the Belmont Challenge.