An ad hoc planning committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will plan, develop, and oversee a set of activities in communities in Southeast Texas focused on building community capacity and resilience to multiple disasters, including floods, Winter Storm Uri, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual members of the planning committee, other experts, and NASEM staff will work with local stakeholders in communities in Southeast Texas to:

• Build relationships and networks with diverse stakeholders across communities;
• Identify opportunities to better prepare for and mitigate concurrent and future disaster risks;
• Better communicate disaster vulnerability and risks to the community; and
• Explore ways that data and science could inform community decision making.

The project will test a variety of community engagement methods and approaches for building resilience, and consider how different data sources could provide a means for better understanding disaster risks and their impacts on Gulf Coast communities.
Activities conducted will include meetings, a workshop, and information sharing. In addition, the project will collect data from communities through focus groups and a household survey.
The committee will convene a final workshop with community stakeholders to identify potential solutions to better prepare for and mitigate disasters; part of the workshop discussions will be based on a staff-authored paper that summarizes household survey data. The workshop will bring together researchers who have collected data in the same community and additional community stakeholders to 1) better understand how diverse datasets, including the data from this project’s household survey, can provide a more comprehensive picture of community challenges across multiple disasters (e.g., pandemic, flooding, environmental hazards); 2) identify potential solutions to address these challenges; and 3) explore potential follow-on activities. A rapporteur-authored workshop proceedings-in-brief will be produced, which will include the staff-authored paper.