Virginia Tech is uniquely positioned to increasingly integrate its climate resilience capabilities into inland communities and tribes across the Commonwealth through its connection to extension specialists and resources.  Furthering these offerings is made possible by taking advantage of university conduits for developing strategic partnerships, via researchers from the Virginia Tech Coastal Collaborator in Hampton, Va.

As the newest core partner of the multi-university collaborative partnership, Resilience Adaptation Feasibility Tool (RAFT), Virginia Tech will join the University of Virginia and Old Dominion University to help communities bolster their climate resiliency by anticipating threats, reducing community vulnerabilities, and respond to and recover from hazardous events and chronic stresses.

“We are excited to lend our collective innovative capacity from disciplines across Virginia Tech to this multi-university partnership to find solutions for resilience challenges in Virginia localities,” said Dr. Wendy Stout, manager of the Virginia Tech Coastal Collaborator.

“The Collaborator offers diverse opportunities to engage with Virginia communities in our shared commitment to building capacity and resilient futures in the face of urgent environmental changes,” said Jessica Rich, research assistant professor in the Center for Coastal Studies in the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. Both she and Stout have worked closely with the other university partners and were the driving force behind joining the RAFT partnership.

Location, location, location

Developed by the Center for Coastal Studies in partnership with the Virginia Seafood Agricultural Research and Extension Center, the Coastal Collaborator Center’s mission is to apply Virginia Tech human capital, innovation, and research capacity to emerging issues and opportunities in Virginia’s coastal zone, as well as communities along connected waterways.

“The fact that the center is here and located in the coastal zone is essential to talking in-person with stakeholders,”  Stout said. “It is a great benefit to employ RAFT to jump in and be present.”

In addition to helping localities develop coastal resilience plans, Stout and Rich also prioritize community outreach. Tools such as the RAFT’s planning framework includes self-assessments that allow localities to help identify their individual vulnerabilities and outline their priorities.

“It also shows us what those impacts look like for different groups within the community,” Rich said. 

Stepping into communities

This spring, Rich was invited as a Virginia Tech faculty representative to participate in RAFT implementation meetings with the Petersburg and Hopewell communities. Members from the two Virginia localities, situated on the Appomattox River, worked with RAFT to create a resiliency plan and learn about potential resources available through university networks. 

RAFT defines resilient planning as “identifying a community’s individual strengths, and analyzing existing weaknesses in its ability to withstand natural and man-made disasters, public health challenges, and socio-economic stressors.”

Since 2018, Lisa Homa, senior research associate for the Virginia Tech Center for Public Health Practice and Research, has actively been involved in helping these communities since 2018. That year, the Center and the Virginia Cooperative Extension were awarded a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant to facilitate the Petersburg Healthy Options Partnerships.  At the time, Petersburg had the highest obesity rate of all Virginia localities.

An important aspect of Homa’s team’s work has been a food policy audit and walkability audits, which overlap with the RAFT’s goal of “connecting people to goods and services, as well as critical infrastructure through transit and broadband.”

Master of public health graduate students have been on the frontlines of working with members of the Petersburg community to conduct these audits at the mobile markets at Petersburg Public Library. The experience allows the students to complete their practicums or integrative learning experiences. “They have the hard and tedious work of using national and global resources/toolkits to craft and suggest policy and program recommendations,” said Homa.

A mobility audit near Walnut Hill Elementary School in Petersburg, Virginia.
As part of the Petersburg Healthy Options Partnerships, members of the community and Virginia Tech master of public health graduate students participated in a mobility audit for the Walnut Hill Elementary School. Photo courtesy of Lisa Homa.

The future

The challenges faced by coastal communities are complex due to the need to balance ecological conservation with economic development, requiring an interdisciplinary approach informed by direct interactions with affected communities. Stout is well situated in Hampton with the Coastal Collaborator Center, where she anticipates being able to fully leverage her research expertise in emerging GIS technologies for coastal resilience applications and the broader development of public-private research and development partnerships.

For example, through a recent Agua award, the RAFT partnership is collaborating with tribal representatives of the federally and state-recognized tribes in Virginia to explore use of the RAFT tool in their communities to help with coastal resilience planning. The team anticipates using data obtained from these initial collaborative efforts to design and move forward with support for resilience efforts of tribes across the Commonwealth.  

Building on that momentum to address future challenges in tribal communities with coastal hazards and disasters, the RAFT partnership was recently awarded funding from the University of Colorado Boulder, through their Natural Hazards Center, a National Science Foundation-funded group.  RAFT team members are excited about contributing to the knowledge base concerning disaster vulnerability and resilience, risk perception, and sustainable strategies for addressing the facets of extreme events of all types.